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A comment on Ask HN: What have the s/w interviews evolved to :(.

Re:Ask HN: What have the s/w interviews evolved to :( by agitator on Thursday June 22, 2017 @09:10PM (#14616507)
You are interviewing at companies that so many people in the field from around the world apply to. So it's really damn challenging to even get an interview lined up. It's up to you, often you can have more fun, and play a bigger role in product design, architecture, and planning at smaller companies. But if you care about the status, pay, and comforts of working at one of the big ones, then go for it. It really depends on what you value.

Also, based on my experience with interviewing and being interviewed, the questions are difficult on purpose. If everyone got the solution, you couldn't differentiate between applicants, but if they are very tough, you can get a sense of a persons problem solving skills, how determined they are, what types of questions they ask to proceed through the problem. etc. It shows a lot about a persons thought process and how likely they are to be successful when a tough problem is thrown at them. Often, getting to the solution isn't the point of the question. Seeing how someone solves something, they haven't encountered before is much more informative (especially for companies and startups working on things that are game changers).

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Re:Ask HN: What have the s/w interviews evolved to :( by throwaway1zz on Thursday June 22, 2017 @09:54PM (#14616655)
I agree with some parts of your answer but I have always wondered do u really evaluate the capabilities solely on an ability to solve these mind bending problems, there are lot of folks who might not know how to get an exact solution for a crazy hard dp problem but are very good devs and vice versa is also true a good cs interview might not necessarily translate to a great dev in a real world scenario.
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Re:Ask HN: What have the s/w interviews evolved to :( by agitator on Thursday June 22, 2017 @10:01PM (#14616680)
I didn't mean to imply that I solely evaluate capabilities based on a mind numbing problem. I think it's important to balance questions: CS coding questions that they should know (based on education or previous projects), and questions that they probably haven't encountered before. This way you get a good assessment of the level and quality of their existing knowledge, and then get to assess how well they can think and solve new challenges.
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