Sounds a lot like an engineer interview with Amazon. Very professional and very stressful.
The problem I have with these SAT style interviews though is that they're weeding out talent unnecessarily. Personally, I tend to get brain-lock when I'm under intense scrutiny, and the stress of knowing that I'm in the middle of a potentially life altering event really isn't helping any.
The reason I think this filter is unnecessary is because I'm pretty sure that "stage fright" isn't actually a problem you'll face if you work at Google or Amazon or Microsoft or wherever. You have projects and goals and you work to complete them. Christ, you're a programmer, not John McClane. Nobody is standing around with their thumb on the detonator watching you write an algorithm for reversing a linked list.
I suppose it would be difficult to scale, but I think what would be more successful for the technical portion of the process would be a Google Code Jam style arrangement whereby you're given a problem to solve, you crunch on it for the evening, and when you've figured it out you upload your code. If it's correct and fast, perhaps you'd make a good employee...
My understanding is that Google totally agrees that they are weeding out talented people. However, given the number of applications they get, they are wise to be more concerned about false-positives than false-negatives. Most companies don't get so many highly-qualified applicants and so would probably be foolish to copy the Google model.
Here's the theory behind Google's hiring strategy: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-wobeg.... It can be summarized as "Don't choose good enough, hire people better than the rest of the team". That's why they won't let individual projects do the interviews, they would lean to hiring the best of the pool, even when that person is not good enough.
I've applied for jobs that did ask you to code a solution to a problem. It was all online, and you could take as much time as you wanted... but they did give an expectation as to how long they thought it should take.
I think this kind of approach could be very scalable, as you know right away before any phone calls or interviews, if you are going to meet some of the basic benchmarks of the job.
I interviewed (unsuccessfully) back in 2006 for an SRE job and initially didn't get any feedback, but after pressing the recruiter, got a description of my strengths and weaknesses.
I don't remember the conversation in detail, but I do remember having to pry a lot and ask specific questions rather than just asking over and over again.
On the subject of "Google interview questions", anyone interested in the subject should check out the reviews on glassdoor.com.
There are several hundred (unverified, as far as I can tell) reports/reviews from people who have interviewed there, with sample questions, stories of their experiences, etc.
I wonder how hot Google would be for access logs and a hidden iframe to a Google domain to potentially get the Gmail address of glassdoor.com users. Furthermore, what would the bias be? Users are self-starting enough to look for help, but is this 'cheating'?
Paranoia, but an interesting thought experiment, and utterly doable.
The problem I have with these SAT style interviews though is that they're weeding out talent unnecessarily. Personally, I tend to get brain-lock when I'm under intense scrutiny, and the stress of knowing that I'm in the middle of a potentially life altering event really isn't helping any.
The reason I think this filter is unnecessary is because I'm pretty sure that "stage fright" isn't actually a problem you'll face if you work at Google or Amazon or Microsoft or wherever. You have projects and goals and you work to complete them. Christ, you're a programmer, not John McClane. Nobody is standing around with their thumb on the detonator watching you write an algorithm for reversing a linked list.
I suppose it would be difficult to scale, but I think what would be more successful for the technical portion of the process would be a Google Code Jam style arrangement whereby you're given a problem to solve, you crunch on it for the evening, and when you've figured it out you upload your code. If it's correct and fast, perhaps you'd make a good employee...