“Simple problems” often aren’t as “simple” as the retrospectively sound if you consider everything like stress level, mixed mindset of the interviewee (they’re not just thinking about a programming problem, they’re also thinking about social queues, mixing conversing in, peer judgement, and loads of other anxiety inducing factors), etc.

The software industry is notorious for underestimating overall complexity factors, understanding uncertainty, and time to manage them and interviews seem to be no different. So “simple” problems are often good (I agree with you) because they’re actually not so simple for most people when you factor everything in, they’re often reasonably challenging under the set of circumstances.

Meanwhile genuinely difficult problems (in any arbitrary setting and longer timelines) require a whole lot of rote training and reusing little clever idiosyncratic techniques that may or may not be generally useful, so you very often end up with a question lottery on whether you already know how to address the problem in question or not correctly vs having some problem where a reasonable solution and expectations around that can be derived in the time (and environment) it’s taking place. Lots of nonsense.

You test the floor, not the ceiling.

Truth is, I'm never looking for "the best", I'm looking for "good enough to do the job competently". Because we can hem and haw over what is best for hours. And we could disagree with what qualities in what proportion make someone "the best". But we can all generally agree with "could do the job". As I've mentioned elsewhere, we're hiring right now and we have the duality of candidates in our pool.

There's one guy who is just a hard no from at least two people in the group. And that translates into a no from the third member simply because we're so adamant that he's not the guy. And there's another who we're all feeling really solid on. Not "the best", but solid floor and we feel they'll be able to learn.

But being able to weed out people who can't even perform the basics despite having a decent resume is invaluable.

I have a friend who has interviewed about 30-40 software engineering candidates for his company (small, publicly traded company from the midwest). He said that FizzBuzz alone is enough to filter out 25% of applicants. The next slight more challenging question will axe another 30-40% of candidates. I think Leetcode hards exist to stroke the egos of select software engineers.

Yea, smaller and medium sized companies just don't have the recruiting infrastructure to weed out the fakers. When I worked in FAANG companies, by the time a candidate got to me, they were pretty good. They went through enough filters and checkpoints and annoying gates that I never really had to do a FizzBuzz equivalent.

When I worked for more medium sized companies, I'd get software engineering candidates who obviously did not even remotely know how to code. Imagine the worst possible software candidate, and then lower your expectation even further. One couldn't even tell me what an "int" was. I think a single "for loop on a whiteboard" question would filter out at least 50% of candidates.

I agree. How are these people graduating? What does that say about our universities?

> "What does that say about our universities?"

"You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink."

It says barely anything about the universities and everything about the student. If a student just wants to just have a perfunctory gargle at the fountain of knowledge instead of drinking as deeply as they can, that's on them.

Well, I'm not impartial... I kind of have a chip on my shoulder against these phonies, but if you want me to speculate: they are faking their way through university the same way they fake their way through everything else in their lives: Through things like charm, good looks, Ivy League mannerisms, confidence, a firm handshake, a beautiful smile, that certain way of talking like a salesman. During Character Creation, they put all their skill points into "charisma" and just use that to sail through situations the rest of us have to work through. I think we all encounter these people all the time during our careers, and it's infuriating that what they are doing is reliable and works.

I wouldn't blame the universities.

Almost everyone embellishes their resume. Some do it to an extreme. The first stage should be weeding these people out, and any hiring manager learns this lesson very quickly.

Story: I learned this as a hiring manager early on. I was the resume screener, first contact and then last contact. Everyone in between was my team and other adjacent teams. I failed to ask the right questions in a phone screen and when we brought this guy on-site he failed very bad. Even worse, he broke down begging for for another problem he could solve.

It was bad for everyone and we were a very accommodating group that gives many tries. We weren't looking for perfect answers to one question.