Went to a few interviews. 1 was with amazon... ok I was expecting the interview to be quite hard.<p>Then went to some small companies and had the same complexity of technical tests with amazon. One of them asked me to code on a board.<p>Should I just look to change my occupation completely? Am I incompetent or people are asking way too much nowadays?
I think it's cultural.<p>Many developers lack traditional credentials.
Others have credentials but didn't really learn the material.
Companies know that hiring bad developers can really hurt performance, morale, culture.
So big tech firms that do lots of hiring decided to invent tests to screen applicants. Smaller firms decided to follow suit since large companies were doing it.<p>If you truly want the jobs on offer, you probably need to cram a bit to pass interview tests. This is easier than it sounds, remember that it's likely going to be tests about the basics of well-known structures and operations (tree traversals, hashing, et cetera). I know it's annoying since it rarely comes up day-to-day, but the worst case is you learn your craft better than you need to.<p>Another route, go into parts of the field that don't have this requirement. I've noticed that certain areas (ERP Development, SQL DBA, etc) don't tend to focus on this and are more concept oriented in interviews. I think it's because you don't really build the tooling, but rather use it solve problems. Also, the job usually isn't for a company that makes its money from software.<p>No judgement (I'm a former ERP developer turned SQL DBA, so I'd probably fail most of these interviews spectacularly).
I would say you need to incorporate a mix of honesty and ingenuity into your response to these situations.<p>If you're asked to 'code a solution to this problem on the whiteboard', the honest answer would probably be that you normally use google for reference, old code etc. and the ingenuity would be for you to write some psuedo-code on the board, anyway.<p>I think this applies to lots of questions.. "Can you tell me how you would sort this data set?". "(honesty) I don't know how, off the top of my head but (ingenuity) I know I could utilise an algorithm and I would probably google/research which would be most appropriate".<p>I'll finish with an anecdote.. in my first IT interview (server builder) I was asked to tell the interviewer what RAID stood for, and which type I would use to ensure my data was safe if one drive blew up. In my inexperienced state of mind, I murmured and was clearly distressed. The interview interrupted and said "If you don't know the answer.. just tell me you don't know, and that you'll find out and tell me later".<p>The lesson there is, sometimes there isn't one clear answer to an interviewers question.<p>Good luck :)
So far all you've said is that they asked you to code on a board and that they were "hard". Without knowing <i>why</i> you found them hard it's impossible to provide any meaningful input.
I think that potential employers always wanna stress you a little to see, what you really can and what is bravado.<p>Good companies might still press to hard (but not give you penalties for failing way-too-hard questions).<p>Also it can be a tactic to see, how you handle stressful and unknown situations (which might occur often depending of your specific line of work and industry).<p>I have made interviews (as the employers' helper) with live coding exercises on a computer, and even if they technically failed I recommended hiring them anyways as I was obvious that their skills where okay but their performance "issue" was stress-related..<p>That said, I know nothing of your skill level, so YMMV...<p>Btw. small companies have similar problems, often just on a much smaller scale (not that it necessarily makes them easier to handle, especially because they have much tighter ressource constraints (less money))
They're hard, quality assessment (on both sides of the table) is hard, there are many incompetent managers (as there are many incompetant techies), and it's a frequently-visited topic on HN.<p><a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?query=interviews&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?query=interviews&sort=byPopularity&p...</a><p><a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?query=recruiting&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?query=recruiting&sort=byPopularity&p...</a><p>More generally, quality assessments of tacit knowledge are intrinsically hard.
Whiteboard coding puzzles, and interviewing in general, are a distinct skill that usually has nothing to do with actual job performance. You can be bad at interviewing and still be a great employee, and vice versa you can be a great at interviewing and a bad employee.<p>You should treat it as a new skill to acquire, however annoying and pointless that is... or figure out ways to get a job without going through that. Some companies have better interview processes.<p>Re coding on a board, here's how I deal with those: <a href="https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/04/04/interview-puzzles/" rel="nofollow">https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/04/04/interview-puzzles/</a>
Welcome to the job market :) you should run a quick search on HN people have been talking about that a lot lately.<p>Long story short - all the tech companies have adopted the google model in order to evaluate candidates. In other words, generalists are in high demand right now and of course in early 2017 there's a higher supply than demand. Companies, small, medium and large can pretty much do whathever the heck they want.
So... You couldn't get hired by a top company so now you think you're incompetent...? I think I miss the logic here. You know, try interviewing at companies that do not belong to the top 5%.