rolandhordos

Don't be embarrassed, it's more of the same point. Exactly zero percent of my 15 years of development experience include writing a bubble sort. Your post represents perfectly what the author is saying about the disconnected, displacing, time wasting effects caused by conventional wisdom about performing tech interviews. If the developer is not themselves you're not hiring who you think you're hiring. I know you don't choke when you're doing good work. There must be a better way.

>> to see how you think about problems .. That is the noble goal. Then it goes horribly wrong along the way because many (very many by this river of comments) don't think the same way during interviews as they did while doing amazing work just the very day before. It's gone too far and it's presently HR "conventional wisdom".

>> getting it correct isn't even that important .. Perfectly proving the point. Coding the day before, you're aggressively focused on getting it right and shipping a quality product. Suddenly you're in an interview and you're doing the opposite, coding just so much irrelevant nonsense that doesn't really matter and being judged out of context. Wasted time, effort, angst, in short a potentially bad start to what might be a great relationship.

I too think something has gone horribly wrong with the "modern tech interview" especially in a large corporation. It feels like a Frankensteinian experiment gone horribly wrong relative to real world results-oriented development. If the actual job was like the "tech interview", and the actual corporation run like the "tech interview" process I would leave screaming inside of a week ;)

Practice can work against you. In one case I was worried about the algorithm and data structures side of things based on glassdoor posts. Spent a week of evenings coding algorithmic whizbangery. In the interview I obsessed on getting every line of from-scratch code right (obsessively focused is often how I code real software) and stopped "listening" to what was being asked. Double whammy was the interviewer was actually not very familiar with the solution to the problem (canned and complex do not mix well) and when I confidently but politely corrected him as we were coding, boy the color of the interview changed fast and game over. My bad, In the real world I'd politely correct a coworker too.

Or maybe what you should practice is writing out JavaScript with pen and paper like another interview. I hadn't written code out by hand for 15 years .. like since the invention of the keyboard. I did a terrible job despite having just completed a non-trivial very modern mobile front end project. Ri-donk-u-lous.

Be yourself, stay balanced, do your best, HR science is evolving too.