Ask HN: How can I prepare for a coding interview in a week?

Re:Ask HN: How can I prepare for a coding interview in a week? by rwnspace on Tuesday August 14, 2018 @04:42AM (#17756325)

I'm not a programming professional, but as I understand it: you study for interviews because the biggest tech companies used to ask difficult data structure & algorithms-based questions, plus some difficult/tricky questions which require a particular style of thinking. Now nearly everyone does it, and YouTube and textbooks offer lots of help... Which has started an 'arms race' in knowledge about DS&A and answers to tricky problems between interviewers and interviewees.

At some point I think it was intended to be like a 'coding-oriented IQ test', after you'd passed a set of HR checkboxes. Obviously an IQ test you study carefully for is not a broadly applicable measure of relative performance. As far as I understand, many of the top companies are shifting away from this interview paradigm, but it'll take the rest of the industry which adopted it a long time to catch up (I imagine).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How can I prepare for a coding interview in a week? by hocuspocus on Tuesday August 14, 2018 @06:18AM (#17756635)

You're mostly right. Also, big companies want to

* Minimize the time spent by their engineers interviewing candidates,

* Standardize the process as much as possible, so that anyone can run the interview.

I'm convinced there are many reasons for smaller shops not to blindly follow Google's practices. But as a candidate, what can you do... it's their loss, I guess.

[ Parent | on HN ]