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When I was coming up in the 90s what I found was it was mostly conversational, sometimes with some whiteboarding although of a much more relaxed nature than contemporary whiteboarding. It was more a tool to help express your thoughts and draw pictures than writing code.

There were some companies like Microsoft who were starting to become known for being more intense, but I never came across that.

It wasn't until the mid-aughts that I started to see brain teasers, "real" whiteboarding, and other aspects that started to bleed into standard interviews.

by bitwize47 minutes ago|

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I'm to understand that Microsoft was one of the companies that had more relaxed interviews in the early 90s, and then took a turn for the more intensive in the mid-90s.

Perhaps the turning point was Jim McCarthy's "beware of a guy in a room", which he meant both figuratively and literally, leading to a transition away from solo or shared offices or even cubicles for software engineers and toward open-plan arrangements. I think that his wisdom led first Microsoft, then the rest of the industry, to treat software engineers not as the darling whiz kids they were in the past, but more a cohort to be closely watched and controlled, as the company is risking a lot on them.

by spullara5 hours ago|

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my first job at a startup (first engineer after the founders) consisted of 13 hours on the phone with the CTO over a few weeks and then an in person all day interview that included traveling from Chicago to SF and a couple of dinners with the founders. this was 1996. our typical interviews after joining were all day affairs and they people almost all people that were referred in or had worked with in the past (I wasn't).

interviews at twitter back in 2010 were 6 hours and that was true even for me when we had an agreement to acquire my company pending the success of those interviews. at the time they had a lot of ex-googlers and they were setup similarly.