The technical interview is an ego trip

This was my take on interviewing with Amazon at one point a long while ago.<p>The initial interview itself was pretty straight forward, but it seemed like every answer I gave was &quot;wrong&quot; because the interviewer was looking for key phrases instead of understanding of the concepts. We talked about hashing, and when he asked if I knew what hashing was I said sure, its a one-way function to create a unique identifier. He asked me to elaborate, so I sorta... talked more? I remember feeling confused because I&#x27;m not sure what else he wanted me to say. Eventually he ended the question, said he was looking for me to say hashing is for &quot;fingerprinting&quot;<p>We moved on, he asked me for an example of a hash function. I said md5 or sha. He pressed further, asked about collisions and eventually cut off the line of questioning telling me he was looking for an example like the modulus function. Questioning lead further to reaching into linked-lists and the like.<p>Having never sat through this kind of interview I was left with a really salty taste for the process. If any they were looking for was me to rattle off some pre-determined key words then what good is the interview for? I incorrectly assumed he was gauging my familiarity with the subject rather than repeating my 2nd year university coarse which introduced shit like data structures and algorithms.<p>His smugness in the way he concluded each topic was just a giant turn off of ever seeking further work with companies like Amazon (giant &amp; highly competitive software conglomerates). I feel like everyone is trying to one up or appear to be king shit in some way, it left a bad taste. (For the record, I did a couple interviews of this style before totally writing the experience off. Others were better, but this experience always stuck with me)

Man. I interviewed somewhere last week for a Scala position, advertising myself as a functional programmer.<p>In the interview, they asked me, &quot;What&#x27;s the difference between fold left and fold right?&quot; I said &quot;Um, one of them starts on the left side of the data structure, one of them starts on the right. I never remember which is which.&quot; They said essentially: &quot;okay. The answer I was looking for was that fold right is not stack safe.&quot; I protested weakly, and they dug in, so I graciously let it go.<p>But it&#x27;s patently not true. A naive implementation of fold right in Scala isn&#x27;t stack safe, but the actual implementation is stack safe. It&#x27;s been stack safe since like 2010. So rather than interrogating my knowledge of functional programming, they&#x27;re just asking me bullshit language trivia, and dinging me when I don&#x27;t come up with their arbitrary wrong answer.<p>I wanted to work there before that, but the interview made me a little ambivalent, and then they just ghosted me. So I guess I dodged a bullet. But man, that was frustrating.

I agree. We recently got rid of our more traditional &quot;tech screen&quot; and replaced it with a 90 minute realistic programming interview.<p>We have 3 tests we give depending on the role (game dev, backend, or SRE). The tests replicate typical work the engineer would be doing, such as adding functionality to a 2D game, developing out a web service for a given API, or debugging and optimizing a linux server. We provide a development environment remotely, or the engineer can use their own. They code&#x2F;work on their own, without needing to share their screen, though we&#x27;re on the line if they have questions or just want to chat. The interview itself takes about an hour and we schedule in buffer time before&#x2F;after to setup and to debrief.<p>We&#x27;ve designed the problems to be (a) relative, (b) scalable and (c) fun. By scalable, I mean that the problem should have a simple, naive solution that most engineers who work in that space should be able to solve quickly and easily, while also having enough space for more advanced engineers to extend the problem and show off a bit.<p>So far we&#x27;ve gotten good feedback from this approach, even for candidates who haven&#x27;t passed. I know 90 minutes is a long time, we but feel that with this test, we get a good, realistic work sample, and we can forgo a lot of the other less effective interviews.<p>(plug: we&#x27;re still hiring [1])<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.singularity6.com&#x2F;careers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.singularity6.com&#x2F;careers</a>

I had the strangest technical interview recently. I didn&#x27;t get an offer, but in every case where that&#x27;s happened before it&#x27;s been obvious to me where my deficiencies lie (which I then use to improve in that area). This time I learnt nothing.<p>It was six individual one-to-one interviews, back to back. The first five were an ego trip for <i>me</i>. I was able to do everything perfectly it seems: read code, write code, talk about code. Then the sixth was this synthetic problem involving nested boxes. I figured out it was a tree problem and started writing code to build the tree. I had an approach in mind and asked the interviewer if he thought that was a good approach (given that there was only enough time for one attempt). He said no, he didn&#x27;t think it would work. That completely threw me off. Later I realised me approach would have worked anyway.<p>I didn&#x27;t get an offer, but what in the ever-loving fuck was the point of putting me through 5 technical interviews only to fail the sixth? It really felt like they were looking for that ego boost but didn&#x27;t get it from me. It&#x27;s hard not to sound arrogant in this situation, but I&#x27;ve been humbled in the past. This time I was just confused.

Of course it is, it&#x27;s a way to gauge whether &quot;someone is dedicated to the job by cramming the algorithms section they haven&#x27;t touched in years&quot;<p>I&#x27;ve done dozens of interviews and after all of it, I realized there are only four qualities we quantify as useful: caring, ability to listen, ability to learn.

&gt; “Often, I will give them a scenario where the processes are failing the team to find what they would do to tackle inefficiencies and if they would be willing to speak up.“<p>While the intention here is good you are unlikely to get an accurate answer from the candidate using this method because the candidate “should” tell you what you want to hear rather than what they would do in reality. You basically want to find out how the developer delivers criticism. Do they bruise egos or are they tactful or do they simply stay silent.<p>A better approach is allowing a candidate to demonstrate how they offer criticism. Give them a codebase to read and make sense of and ask them to explain it to you. Ask them to to point out parts that could be better designed. You can gather a lot of information this way. 1. Can the candidate read a foreign codebase and make sense of it. 2. Can the candidate pick up business logic from the code. 3. Does the candidate offer criticism that is likely to make another developer defensive or are they more guarded with their communication and offer higher level design alternatives.

Articles like this always underestimate how many bullshit artists there are out there. The technical interview is not perfect but it is still far more meritocratic than many fields.

I&#x27;m coming to the realization that there&#x27;s almost no point in spending time on a lot of the things that I love about being a developer: learning new languages, studying best practices for your tech stack, reading software engineering books, becoming involved in tech communities, keeping up with the latest trends. Interviewers don&#x27;t value any of that beyond lip service. The only thing worth spending time on is leetcode grinding, it can be worth 10s of thousands of dollars.<p>The attitude of the algorithm geniuses is that software engineering is easy and anyone can learn it, which might be true, but my point is that I already did learn it and I spent five years becoming an expert in it. That should be valuable to your business whether you look down upon it or not.

This is super true. I was interviewing with a Startup once, and we had an initial screening, and they had a lot of work to be done with AWS, some APIs and data pipelines. My area of work. When we had a &quot;technical&quot; interview, it was completely algorithms focused. And the interviewer dropped a few anchors, which restricted my thinking, and caught me cycling. It was super obvious the call wasn&#x27;t going great. Odd enough, they acknowledged, that I was one of their best candidates, and were surprised. I didn&#x27;t get the offer. It was a job I knew I could&#x27;ve aced, but the questions they asked didn&#x27;t match up to what they actually needed done :&#x2F;

&gt; My golden rule for technical interviews is that, &quot;Every step, conversation and question must be pertinent to the day-to-day of the role.&quot; While this may be obvious, I am sure that many hiring managers are still expecting candidates to arrive at technical interviews with Computer Science books memorized. This form of technical interviews should be made obsolete.<p>Here&#x27;s the core of the article right here. The &quot;regurgitate LeetCode-style problems&quot; interview fails to be relevant to the day to day of pretty much any SWE job (unless, maybe, you&#x27;re applying to work for LeetCode, and one of the duties is to create solutions to problems in under 40 minutes, without outside resources).<p>Take the author&#x27;s golden rule and layer on a structured interview process, and <i>now</i> you&#x27;ve got an interview process that will be more predictive of whether a candidate is a good hire than any &quot;throw a random engineer in a room with the candidate and have them answer random algorithm problems&quot; type interview. Even better, since you have an actual process, you can tweak it to be even <i>more</i> predictive of a good hire.<p>Why don&#x27;t companies understand this?

Can we also add to the list of things that we don&#x27;t need 8 interviews AND a tech screen to figure out whether a person can code?

Is it already that time of the week again?

I really like the interview process the author lays out here. As someone who has been working for about 20 years in the industry, this feels like a better, more direct gauge of how well someone will fit in the role than of seeing if they know how to invert a binary tree. I do think it&#x27;s still worth doing some sort of coding question, but it doesn&#x27;t have to be some intricate algorithmic puzzle. It can be as simple as, &quot;How would you design X?&quot; for design and some data structure algorithm question, but something that does not take up the bulk of the interview. (Perhaps one interview in the loop could be devoted to hands-on coding.)<p>One of the best interviews I had, and I&#x27;m biased here since i hit out of the park, was one where the interviewer literally gave me a laptop and told me to code a simple iOS app. I was applying as a senior iOS developer with many years experience, so it was totally fair to ask it. Having written several apps on the side, I got straight to work and knew exactly how to set up data structures, algorithms, and trade-offs. Even with my experience, I was not able to finish the complete app in the time allotted, but I was able to breeze through all the elements of of what go into designing an app from scratch.<p>I had a few more interviews and later they offered me a job, but I ended up working elsewhere. Interestingly, the place I did take a job at had more traditional tech interviews, which I actually found too easy compared to larger tech companies, however there was more long-term growth available there and the pay was much better.

Ego Trip is the right phrase. A lot of the traditional algorithms puzzler interviews amount to the material being covered in an adversarial, closed-book fashion for the interviewee, after the interviewer has themselves gotten to master the material in a &quot;at your leisure&quot; fashion with an open book.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t mind getting asked nasty questions about red-black trees or Krushkal vs Prim or something if I knew the person sitting across from me had taken a &quot;pass this test under these same conditions or you&#x27;re fired&quot; type scenario. It wouldn&#x27;t make these interviews a <i>good</i> idea, but it&#x27;s the reek of hypocrisy about them that puts it over the top for me.<p>I still contend these interviews - in any form - are a hazing exercise designed to convince you that your own expertise doesn&#x27;t really matter. You may think of yourself as a accomplished professional developer but to BigCo you are a Smart Person (?) Grade N to be slotted into an arbitrary role. What better way to convey this message than put you through an interview that you would have been best equipped to pass straight out of university or grad school? I suspect my peak &quot;pass the tech interview&quot; would have been straight out of the core courses mid-PhD and my ability to do this has since gone down every year.

I&#x27;m doing a lot of interview as an interviewer these days mostly with junior candidate.<p>The guy in charge of those before me was the kind that use aha question with no relevance whatsoever. Pure ego trip. If that guy had interviewe me I would have said &quot;I don&#x27;t know&quot; a few times and eventually get up and leave.<p>For my candidates, I tried a few things. Now I&#x27;ve got it down to explain to me your last project. I ask questions until I&#x27;ve understood every little detail of the project. Then we code a few simple &quot;exercises&quot; with increasing &quot;difficulty&quot;. The candidate is allowed google, documentation, questions, anything. Then we <i>read</i> code. A piece of code with a &quot;bug&quot; or a feature to add.<p>The key is to make them talk about concept from impérative, fonctionnal and object paradigm and interact like a junior and senior dev would in a dev team.<p>I found that junior candidates react pretty well to these. Some of them thank me for having had the opportunity to learn about new things like functionnal programming. It&#x27;s pretty cool and I feel that make them want to join us most of the time.

One issue is very few people get interview training. I have interviewed maybe 100 people but had to figure it out for myself what works. I wish I could apologize to the first few dozen.

Look, you have to do technical interviews. You don&#x27;t have to be a bully, but you have to find a way to probe the candidate&#x27;s ability to solve technical problems and code.<p>Pick a question that tests the skills you&#x27;re looking for, but not too closely related to the problems you encounter every day, as that will introduce really strong bias. Pick a question that can be answered in 10 or 20 minutes on a white board. The question should seem really easy, so prepare a follow up question (or two) that adds difficulty for the candidate that needs the challenge.<p>But here&#x27;s the most important part: use the same question in at least 10 interviews. Test your questions by using them on many candidates. Don&#x27;t introduce uncertainty by playing a different role in every interview. You&#x27;ll get much better results.

&quot;Every step, conversation and question must be pertinent to the day-to-day of the role&quot;<p>While I agree with the author&#x27;s &#x27;golden rule&#x27;, I believe the complex data structure questions are just a way to filter interviewing candidates in a highly competitive job market. It&#x27;s akin to the highly competitive Indian Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) where hundreds of thousands of students solve complex problems in Math, Physics, and Chemistry to get into premiere institutions with few thousand seats, most of whom do not pursue a career in sciences.

Problem solving skill is a must. Not saying to cram the algorithms. But using those in your approach shows the ability of the candidate&#x27;s efficiency and quickness in solving them.

There&#x27;s so much hate for &quot;whiteboard interviews&quot; and &quot;interviewers focusing on themselves rather than the candidate&quot; and all that on HN, but what if...this is actually what works for some companies?<p>Some people want to work on super challenging problems with technically brilliant coworkers. Some people treat a poor performance not as a humiliation, but as an opportunity to understand how much they do not yet know.<p>What if you want to attract candidates like that? Ask them tough questions, don&#x27;t tailor the questions to their strengths, and have the interviewers show off how smart they are (even if they&#x27;re not, it&#x27;s easy to appear smart when you have all the answers). Pay good money and have high prestige so that you get plenty of quality applicants for every role, because you&#x27;re going to miss out on many of the good ones, but you will attract some of the brightest and most driven people.

As an interviewer and decision maker around hiring engineers, there is zero legitimate reason to make the candidate feel like an idiot for not knowing something. It&#x27;s easy enough to clarify what they&#x27;re saying, and if there&#x27;s a miss to just say &quot;ok cool&quot; and to ask the next question.

Ha! Zoox (the self driving car company) out of the 5 hours, 2 hours were math problems. Couldn’t google. Couldn’t use a calculator. No notepad. Had to use a zoom virtual whiteboard.<p>What’s the area of an equilateral triangle ? Volume of a sphere? Sorry. Haven’t needed to use that in eons. I usually just google it.

Unpopular opinion: I like technical interviews. They at least enforce <i>some</i> form of a standard hiring bar.<p>I feel this way because I&#x27;ve seen hiring for non-technical roles, e.g., project management, etc. They basically end up being friends hiring friends, with minimal domain expertise.

Most technical interviews aren&#x27;t technical. You are expected to know irrelevant trivia like which port does ICMP use? There&#x27;s literally no job on earth where that matters.<p>So when I did technical interviews; I had a demo domain controller vm. I printed out 5 steps they need to do. dcpromo, slave domain.local to the dc, install wsus. pretty boring stuff that much candidates know how to do. My trick, there&#x27;s lots of tiny details like did you get the server&#x27;s name instead of SERVER-1897237534<p>Oh and I&#x27;ll be talking about video games, tv and movies distracting you as much as possible during the testing. I just sit there asking them question after question about hobbies. Really really distracting.

Sadly there is another side to this - by not doing any kind of technical assessment you expose yourself to fraud. I would have never expected that in the past, but after nearing a hundred interviews I saw a few cases of a candidate&#x27;s skills as judged by code samples looking <i>completely different</i> once they were writing code on the spot. The exercises were all related to real tasks. I don&#x27;t think we&#x27;d have caught on through product or problem-solving questions.

So I&#x27;ve always wondered about these leetcode interviews, having never suffered one myself, if you&#x27;re given one you&#x27;ve seen before, are you still supposed to pretend you&#x27;re working it out from first principles?

Sometimes your job is just to make the button bigger.<p>That job is not called software engineer, that job is called junior code monkey and pays $25k&#x2F;yr.

I want to work with engineers that know their basic algorithms. Sorry, but complicated projects require smart solutions. If you don’t know the basics, you won’t be able to solve difficult problems efficiently.

idk i do well in them

Sad but true

Oh I see it&#x27;s time for this blog post again.

YC2025 - &quot;home.ly&quot; - we aim to disrupt the remote technical interview process by replacing capricious human interviewers with the latest conversational AI leet-bots...

If we aren&#x27;t complaining about interviews where we got the offer and turned it down, there&#x27;s a serious risk we&#x27;re experiencing &quot;sour grapes&quot;. Every interview I failed was an opportunity to get better. If it feels arbitrary and you don&#x27;t get the job... you may just be below the bar. No shame in that... buy there&#x27;s definitely shame in this sadly common framing attack on the concept of the tech screen.