Hiring software engineers is hard, and you want to know if they will be a good fit for your team. Tanker is using a refactoring exercise to get the most valuable information about the candidates in the minimum amount of time. The whiteboard is a peek into the reasoning abilities of the candidate, but it doesn’t give any information about their ability to work in a team, understand a new codebase, or their skills with a given programming language. Another technique is to ask the candidate to implement a project “from scratch” at home. This technique avoids some of the above pitfalls.