I work in the public sector. There is a very strong "this must be fair to all applicants" bend. The same criteria is used for all applications - in particular, the exact same questions.
As part of the application, I was instructed to provide 2-3 paragraphs on each of half a dozen questions that covered various aspects of software engineering. The in person interview asked a predefined set of questions about the material that I had provided. That part was more of a "demonstrate that you have the mastery of the material claimed in the written portion and that it wasn't produced by someone else or some other source". This also tested communication skills.
No weight was given to GitHub contributions, hacker rank, leetecode rank or whatnot. There was no whiteboard.
While this isn't a fabulous job at a tech company, it is one where good engineers can and do find themselves at without needing to have the proper shibboleth to get into one of those tech companies.
For another job application that was more of a sysadmin/programmer bend, a simple backup script was the assignment (took about 1h to get all of the edge cases). A portion of the interview was a demonstration and review of the code (in which I had to answer questions about the code that I had written).
While mock interviews can be helpful in the communication skills department and reducing anxiety, there are many other ways to test the person rather than use a proxy such as contributions to a public repository or foo rank websites... and also without resorting to whiteboard for various algorithmic tricks that you either know or don't know.
As part of the application, I was instructed to provide 2-3 paragraphs on each of half a dozen questions that covered various aspects of software engineering. The in person interview asked a predefined set of questions about the material that I had provided. That part was more of a "demonstrate that you have the mastery of the material claimed in the written portion and that it wasn't produced by someone else or some other source". This also tested communication skills.
No weight was given to GitHub contributions, hacker rank, leetecode rank or whatnot. There was no whiteboard.
While this isn't a fabulous job at a tech company, it is one where good engineers can and do find themselves at without needing to have the proper shibboleth to get into one of those tech companies.
For another job application that was more of a sysadmin/programmer bend, a simple backup script was the assignment (took about 1h to get all of the edge cases). A portion of the interview was a demonstration and review of the code (in which I had to answer questions about the code that I had written).
While mock interviews can be helpful in the communication skills department and reducing anxiety, there are many other ways to test the person rather than use a proxy such as contributions to a public repository or foo rank websites... and also without resorting to whiteboard for various algorithmic tricks that you either know or don't know.