I get itchy when I get asked to write code that I would veto in a code review.
My internal dialog when asked things like a linked list or a hash table is "Oh god, does this mean they like code like this? I bet some 'clever person' at this company wrote their own hash table/event queue/template engine* and forces everybody else to use it."
* Unfortunately my current employer is just like this but I didn't pick up on that in the interview process.
Re:They Rejected Us
by IggleSniggle on Sunday December 09, 2018 @11:38PM
(#18645259)
You and me both. And it feeds itself, too, because every line of code is an opportunity to reinvent the wheel or do something clever (it sometimes seems like they want to see that, or else this class of question wouldn’t be asked??).
Even within Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, you're usually being interviewed by a fresh-out-of-school 20-something who has no idea how to do much of anything, let alone evaluate candidates fairly. And yes, they "train" these kids -- but you basically can't train someone to do something that relies heavily on intuition. That requires experience, but 20-somethings don't have experience. So instead, they're "trained" to do the one thing you can do repeatably: ask coding puzzle questions from a book, and reject anyone who doesn't regurgitate answers with 100% fidelity. It's the McDonald's food of interviewing: not the best (or even good), but consistent across a large organization. Sort of.
So while big companies need people who can work on a team, exercise good judgment, communicate clearly, write clean code and not be racist/sexist/evil jerks, they get...people who can memorize questions from a big book of programming questions. I can easily come up with tests that get to each of those properties...but they rely on interviewers having good judgment, and most do not.