It’s 1 pass/fail credit out of 180 to graduate. The course looks as much like how to job hunt as anything else. (Resume writing, etc)

In design school, we had one class which involved things like developing your portfolio, learning how to present yourselves to companies, interviews with Creative Directors, etc.

Given that technical interviews a common method of partially evaluating engineers/developers, it doesn't strike me as particularly odd for a practical course to exist that helps students maximize their ability to get a job. As you mentioned, it's really only one class out of dozens of others they'll take over several years. Myself, I took a number of electives that had far less practical impact on my career trajectory.

I don't think most people have a problem with the class itself. It's more that the technical interview has gotten away from a practical method of showing what you know, and is now becoming a skill to maximize itself, whether or not it actually demonstrates if you can do the job.

To take an absurd example, imagine if for some reason Law firms started requiring an Irish Stepdancing component to their hiring process. I'm sure broadly speaking, you'll see the most dedicated lawyers practicing away on nights and weekends, and the best Law Schools with the best students will hire the best Irish Stepdancing teachers. But at the end of the day, Irish Stepdancing has very little to do with practicing Law. Similarly, if solving stupid whiteboard problems has so little to do with being a Software Engineer, that they can't be learned in the 40+ other courses or internships/PT work, that a student will have to do in their time at University, then the question is why are they even done?

This isn't quite so far fetched as it seems. Perhaps someone tried the dancing thing to see how a candidate handles himself in an awkward position under pressure in front of people. They found some limited value in it and wrote a blog post about it. Then other law firms started using it. It became a way for such firms to assess a candidates emotional strength under pressure. And now law schools are offering a 1 credit course in "interview dance". Seems to be the perfect analogy to what's going on here ;-)

hehe. My typical example for how a technical interview can go absurd is cartwheels.

Again, nothing wrong with someone trying to get it right but at the end of day we all lose.

I’m Irish. WTF is Irish step dancing or Irish stepdancing?

On the correlation of irrelevant things to performance in a demanding job you know law school is at best as related to the practice of law as Bar review courses right?

Dancing with your steps; apparently famous since '94

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_stepdance

At Google, the recruiter who schedules your interview specifically recommends reading books written about passing Google's interviews. It's a little unbelievable.

I'm pretty sure they're incentivized to find candidates that get offers - not to find "good employees" or anything of that sort.

I would think there is a Venn diagram with an overlapping 'sweet spot': Good employees are probably more likely to get offers, as are candidates that prepare for an interview.

Similar experience, spent the same time preparing for the interview as for any other company + couple of hours of browsing some slides from university classes on data structures (sorry Google, you are not a special snowflake) - rejected after the first call:)

  It's a little unbelievable.

If they believe they have the _ideal_ benchmark for a good employee, anything you do that improves your score makes you a better employee.

The idea that you now need to take a class to learn how to successfully interview with tech companies in order to prepare for interviews is terrifying.

It's nothing new when it comes to competitive programming, which whiteboard interviews are just watered-down versions of. Russian/EE/Chinese universities are doing that for ages:

https://www.edx.org/course/how-win-coding-competitions-secre...

I actually had a job where it was relevant. Solving whiteboard problems is half the job of a nuclear field operator. I had to do boards with the captain of the ship, senior enlisted, and the reactor officer to qualify watch stations. The other half of the job is cleaning bilges till you make first class or weasel your way into an office job. It's not a fun job by any means but it paid for my College so I could do something I enjoy, Computer Science.

This isn't that far removed from an algorithms or data structures class, or what you would learn in one of those programming olympics type prep courses that people do.