supran

This is why I heavily push to talk to nearly everyone on teams at the prospective company that I might be a good fit for. I spend 3-4 hours talking to various people over the course of 3-4 weeks. If the company doesn't allow me to talk to their employees, then I pass them up.

That's outrageous. Starting the death march before you even get an offer.

I've done this for nearly every job in the past. However, since moving to the Bay Area, I would never consider quitting my job just to look for another. As one commenter below said, you put yourself at a disadvantage when you're bargaining for compensation.

I can agree that it's pretty difficult to find a new job while still working. However, most companies let you work from home nowadays. You can just interview during that time. Is it ethical? Who cares? It's business; the nature of the beast.

I have a CS degree from CMU, and I've only run into that sort of attitude once. The interviewer nit-picked my solution to some character array manipulation question. I didn't get an offer. The interviewer wrote some snarky comment on his Twitter the day after my interview; something about "the difference between a computer scientist and engineer". Six months later his company was bought and chopped up. He got laid off. Karma's a bitch.

Conversely, I've been hired, without a formal interview, twice merely for having gone to CMU. I guess it can work out either way.

In senior positions CS knowledge is less relevant day-to-day, because your experience overrides a lot of that theoretical stuff. However, whenever I apply to companies, the questions about basic CS usually result in me turning down interviews. It would be a poor use of my time to memorize that stuff again only to not use it beyond the interview.

You're too forgiving. I turn down interviews when they list "linked lists, hashing, breadth/depth first search" on their study guide. I've never had to write a linked list EVER in my career, don't fucking bother me with that shit. Also, if the position is in a language where linked lists would be stupid (i.e. python), then I definitely reject that company.

I can explain what everyone of them is, and why you'd want to use them. But I've never written any one of them and I'm not going to spend the time to memorize something I can look up in my CLR book or stackoverflow.

It's embarrassing that tech interviewing is still stuck in a 1990s mindset.