throwawaytousan

The questions are indeed puzzles; that's why Gayle Laakmann and others have made a living publishing books of the questions themselves. And the puzzles are distinctly different from the content in the majority of CSE curricula.

What's more is problematic is that the construction and evaluation of the puzzles is highly subjective and nearly everywhere lacks rigor. Completion time is a key metric while quality of communication is most commonly either ignored or not assessed at all uniformly among interviews.

(Aside: what's frustrating is that companies make candidates sign NDAs for on-sites; these prevent candidates for disclosing or _selling_ the information they might glean in the process, which very rarely happens. In actuality, it's the former interviewers who violate protections for "confidential info" and copyright when they go and monetize their experience post-job, or even on-the-job e.g. Rooftop Slushie).

> Most of us are not interested in ruining the day of someone who is unhappy with the hiring process

That's only true in so far as you, as an employee, are paid to achieve positive sentiment among candidates, no matter how shallow that sentiment may be. That's indeed cruel, and it's well-established that interviewers are widely unaware of the consequences of the current hiring process. That's why we get articles like those from the OP.

A true interest in improving the hiring process includes: * Making prep materials and courses freely available (helps industry candidates) * Committing time to CSE outreach to better integrate company needs to CSE (helps new grads) * Finding questions that reflect real tasks on the job (helps the evaluation have a chance of being predictive) * Closing the information gap between hiring managers and candidates: disclosure (in aggregate) of hiring rates, salaries, etc.

Playing along and doing hundreds of coding puzzle interviews is a waste of time for all involved.

fixed! yes it was 1,000 even, or about 200 per year. 10,000 resumes screened.

I’m a former interviewer for a FAANG competitor that had a successful IPO. I had to do over 1,000 interviews in 5 years. The VP of Eng told me I was “highly accurate.” We used leetcode-like programming questions.

I don’t think the FAANG-style coding puzzles have anything new to add to the conversation here. The reason big companies do that is because the questions are prompts are simple to write explain (hence interviewer has to do very very little), the answer space is generally well-defined (so it’s easy to grade, and easy for a Hiring Manager to check if the interviewer screws up), and they almost exclusively select for completion time (which is key in a high-pressure feature house company).

Most of the discussion here seems to be interested in alternatives. Through my experience, I can’t agree enough with the article author who posts:

Not a single person out of several thousand emails and messages came out in defense of the current state of interviewing processes - I’ll let this one stand on its own.

The only people I’ve seen to defend the current process in public are ex-FAANG people who were actively monetizing their experience (e.g. Gayle Laakmann).