What would you say are examples of meaningful vs. pointless CS questions? Anecdotally speaking, I've heard of senior engineer interviews where the candidate has an impressive resume but has difficulty coding solutions to "basic" problems.

For a senior role - "Basic"/pointless problems are those algo questions you would ask at the big 4. Rarely will you find a senior level engineer knowing the best solution to inverting a binary tree or any other text book problem you know because 9/10 times those are not used at all in any of the most common real world cases.

However, what meaningful questions will cover are advanced architectural problems, particular inner workings of a tool/framework, how to squeeze in the last few drops of optimization etc. Conversation should flow without any major breaks and the most experienced engineers will talk about edge cases of edge cases, thus continuing the conversation themselves. You can discuss different types of architectural patterns, ins and outs of each one and how it can be applied to a particular problem.

You should not waste the engineers time on textbook questions if you value yourself or the interviewee, and as the parent comment stated - the engineer should walk out if they start asking "basic" questions. Someone that worked in the industry for 10-15 years should not be bothered with them.

Do you want employees who when they need to sort something their first thought is "I'll write this from scratch"? Pretty much every language and framework out there has it's own optimized sorting algorithm provided by the standard library of the language. In the rare cases where for whatever reason that isn't the right answer you'd be better off with someone who knows how to properly research a problem and find a solution based on the particulars not repeat some standard line from their University CS classes.

That's a great way to find yourself without any hopes of a job. Companies (including all of the big ones) pretty much all conduct interviews this way and there's no way they're going to change their practices in light of one person's crusade when there's an endless supply of candidates who want that job.

> Companies (including all of the big ones) pretty much all conduct interviews this way

I've interviewed for developer positions in Pennsylvania, with companies ranging from well-known Fortune 500s to local shops. Not one of them had a whiteboard, asked me to write code, or asked me to develop an algorithm or solve a puzzle.

The interviews were largely the same as those I've heard about for most other jobs: you go over your resume, talk about what you did at past jobs, answer cliche questions like "how do you handle disagreement" or "where do you see yourself in 5 years", talk about the position they're hiring for and their culture, and maybe about compensation.

So maybe it's more accurate to say something like "tech companies (primarily the big ones in Silicon Valley) in the handful of high-tech startup hubs in the world pretty much all conduct interviews this way".

If this comment gets more popular, the Philly and Pittsburgh tech scenes are gonna suddenly explode with devs who are sick of both SV interview practices and rent prices.

relevant "How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub"

http://paulgraham.com/pgh.html

Yes, I was implying tech companies, I should have been explicit.

Agreed in theory, but if you want a job at $bigco you don't have much choice in the process.