Readit News[1] http://www.geekwire.com/2011/amazons-bezos-innovation/
Any time you do something big, that’s disruptive — Kindle, AWS — there will be critics. And there will be at least two kinds of critics. There will be well-meaning critics who genuinely misunderstand what you are doing or genuinely have a different opinion. And there will be the self-interested critics that have a vested interest in not liking what you are doing and they will have reason to misunderstand. And you have to be willing to ignore both types of critics. You listen to them, because you want to see, always testing, is it possible they are right?
I think you would be hard-pressed to demonstrate that their processes are consistent.
Sure, interviewers themselves are inconsistent (accents, prejudice, interview difficulty, etc), but that's not something that can be fully mitigated when every candidate gets a different set of interviewers.
Again, I'm not defending the practice and would just like to have a constructive discussion.
Coming up with a scalable hiring filter mechanism that doesn't belittle or frustrate the kinds of engineers are you are trying to attract is fundamentally not the problem of your hirees.
Now, maybe the top engineers will suffer through the process, in which case fine, run the whiteboard interviews. But increasingly, it seems like the real cream of the crop are saying "companies that run these kinds of interviews are too rigid for me to be willing to work for them".
Complaining about it won't actually attract those engineers back, because _your_ hiring process is not _their_ problem. They don't care about your hardships, and why should they?
First impressions matter, and if their first impression of your company is that you make everyone you see jump through arbitrary hoops regardless of merit, it's not really surprising they might not want to work for you. Telling them that the hoops are needed to keep the riffraff out hardly improves your image.
Maybe you'll have to accept you'll have to hire some bad engineers in order to get the great ones, and do the filtering as a longer process.
Maybe it's not possible for a 50,000+ employee company to have a hiring process that isn't belittling.
Maybe there's a third technique others haven't worked out.
But whatever the answer, you can be damned sure that complaining the world is unfair won't actually solve the problem for you.
To be clear, I can see why big companies prefer coding interviews (it's more "consistent" when interview feedbacks are boiled down to a score), but at the same time I'm not defending it because like many have said it's not a great measure of an engineer's capability. I'm looking at the problem from the employers' point of view.