Let's think about this like an engineer solving a problem.<p>What we have here is a population (interviewees) that we want to sample according to some metric. We want to apply some series of filters that limit the sample to only candidates that exceed some threshold of suitability for a task.<p>After forming a model for that filter, we apply it and begin to suspect that we're not extracting the optimal subset of interviewees.<p>In <i>any</i> other scenario, the answer to this lack of fit would be to change the sampling method/filters. But for some reason, unique to the interview process, interviewers decide the solution is for the population of interest to "study" at passing our filters. In other words, we find we have a bad measuring instrument and instead of designing a new instrument, the reaction is to insist that the samples work harder to fit the bad measurements.<p>I'd like to propose if qualified candidates have to study for your "test", you're test isn't very good at finding qualified candidates.<p>By the time a candidate makes it to an interview, initial screeners should have eliminated those that haven't proven their ability to study for a test when given the parameters of that test in advance. Try coming up with better questions to determine if they're a good fit for your company.<p>...<p>Now excuse me while I go re memorize all the big-O worst/best case performance for algorithms from my first year of undergraduate instead of just deriving it out or looking it up in a table like we all know we do in reality. (unless we use it every day)<p><i>edit</i><p>Oh, and the tool looks really fun and will probably help in said interviews. ;)
Well, I think nothing beats a good book, written just for the exact purpose, something like Cracking the coding interview is worthy enough to get the right kind of info for preparing for any kind of an interview. It also gets revised every year. Plus moving from one chapter to another, just take flipping a few pages : UI is simple and efficient. I can just read what i need to read, I can workout the problems on my own, or if I am stuck I can see hints of the complete solution. I mean there is no stopping to my learning, and the pace, flow and direction is set my me. Shouldn't some problems be deemed solved in the offline world, and not be bloated to online proportions?!
Founder of <a href="http://InterviewKickstart.com" rel="nofollow">http://InterviewKickstart.com</a> here. This is a great observation and I fully agree with the author.<p>I joined Box.com as an Engineer in 2008, when we were 5 engineers. Grew rapidly with the company and was most recently a Director in Engineering, managing multiple teams full of amazing people. Left after 6 years, to fulfill my entrepreneurial dreams. Box was my career-launching company. (And it is, for many other engineers). I have also worked at Microsoft and eBay.<p>Along the way, I had the incredible opportunity to help our technical teams grow from 5 to ~250 engineers. This meant living and breathing the interviewing machine exploring all its nooks and corners, and ups and downs.<p>Box is also a company that constantly questions and improves its interviewing processes. That relentless focus helped us hire great engineers.<p>I noticed however, that despite all that attention, hiring took an unreasonably long amount of time and much agony. We’d go through hundreds of resumes, countless phone screens and countless onsite interviews for each open position.<p>That bothered me to no end. If most of our interviews were of reasonably average difficulty, our scoring method was well-structured, and our interviewers well-trained, why would only a few candidates clear our interviews? Yet, in the end, our pass rate was <5%. I was not ready to believe that rest 95% of people were not competent.<p>I dug into this extensively, and realized that while everyone was hard-working and very smart in their own way, they vastly under-estimated the amount of preparation it would take to clear programming interviews at top companies. They only had a vague idea of what to expect, and did not have enough practice to solve interview problems under time-pressure. Their daily jobs or schools did not prepare them for handling interviews.<p>I found more evidence of this from the career-coaching I did on the side (pro-bono). Many candidates would even want to change their careers, thinking they were not good at programming, simply because they weren't able to crack interviews.<p>I'm now doing something similar in the valley, but in a very high-touch, classroom setting way, for experienced professionals: <a href="http://InterviewKickstart.com" rel="nofollow">http://InterviewKickstart.com</a>. We've been lucky to have had excellent success and very satisfying career transforming stories.
I feel the product is highly needed looking at the big gap between the curriculum and the actual industry. Plus the engaging factor and gamification is going to develop the skills at backend along with the real-time enjoyment.