Hiring without whiteboards

1 - I've been active in sports my whole life. I work 40 hours a week, play in several competitive hockey leagues and still have time to tinker and build stuff in my own time. I'm also studying to get my commercial drone license, and have a host of other hobbies that keep me busy outside of coding.

2 - The only way I feel like a developer can possibly stay in tune with how fast our industry is changing is to code outside of where they currently work.

A good example is at my current gig we're building apps with AEM (Adobe Experience Manager), Java and AngularJS (1.4). If I wanted to go work in a smaller startup, do you think my knowledge of 1.4 is going to be helpful when most of my friends who are working at similar places have been developing with Angular2 for almost 6 months now? If I'm not working on my own to keep up, my skills will be completely obsolete when I want to get a new gig.

That's just a fact of life. I don't have any friends who simply show up, work 9-5, spit out some code and then go home and not do anything. Likewise, they don't go home, crack open Visual Studio and code until they pass out on the keyboard. It's pretty easy to do stuff in your off time and still have a social life.

You should consider offering multiple technical tests and letting the candidate choose. Ideally the choices would range from whiteboard, take-home project, quiz site (hackerrank), or pair coding.

Too bad (for candidates) that that concern doesn't appear to be shared by... well almost everyone in tech hiring these days. The general wisdom of the day seems to be "it's better to eliminate 100 false negatives than hire one false positive."

I interned successfully at FB, Microsoft and Google as a SWE in 2008-2010 and interviewed with a lot of other tech companies (not always but often successfully). Like you, I tend to freeze up in a whiteboard situation, and have most of my life, going back to college and prior (I studied in Romania where at the time you had to stand up and answer questions and use a whiteboard to answer them). I find that a few things help:

1. Practice practice practice. Simulate the interview with a few friends multiple times. It gets easier no matter how shy you are.

2. Smart interviewers and companies open with easy, friendly questions that put the interviewee at ease. It's a sign they understand this is stressful for everyone, no matter how confident, knowledgeable and smart they are.

While these interviews aren't perfect, with the right attitude they are helpful: it shows how the person thinks through a problem and communicates their ideas, and how they "work together" with the interviewer.

These are important skills that are important for all people regardless of their title.

I also believe a solid CS foundation is important even if coding is mostly putting things together. A systematic, mathematical understanding of complexity of Algorithms and Data Structures shows in one's everyday decisions.

There are only a few valid alternatives in my mind: 1. Take-home project work More realistic assessment of how effective a person is. Really good simulation of that, but no signal about their collaboration style, interpersonal dynamics etc. 2. On-site trial for a week or two This is probably the best way to assess someone's ability - internships and residencies are as close to real life as one can get. It's hard for people who already have a job, and expensive for a company to do. Simpler proxies/filters are needed.

Am I missing any other ways to assess candidates?

White board interviews are supposed to be interactive. When I solve a problem, I always verbally say whatever is going on in my mind and share it with them. This does two things : 1. Helps me focus on the next steps instead of letting my mind race through different solutions, context switch often and lose track of my own thoghts. 2. Gives feedback to the interviewer so he knows I am on the right track and if not, give me clues (with or without him wanting to) that I can pick up on and proceed further.

In the end, my white board interviews always went like a conversation, a deep discussion about a problem that involves coming up with a solution and attacking it to see its pros and cons. I have come to appreciate the process itself because it tests several things like communicating to the team, problem solving, being open to other ideas etc.

Edit : I'd also like to note here that I didn't get these skills in my first interview. My first several interviews went horribly wrong like you mentioned. It is a skill that you need to invest time in. And you have to believe that the time you invest in this will pay off eventually. It did for me in several ways.