Tech Interviews are a modern day corporate HOT OR NOT

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1) Given proper guidance and mentorship any BS in CS or Coding Bootcamp new grad can perform a job as an entry level SWE in any industry.

2) Anyone with 5+ years of industry experience as a frontend, backend, data or devOps engineer can translate business requirements to production ready features and functionalities in a stack of their choice. They may not have been operating at a google scale but given the chance they get to the level.

3) Anyone with 10+ years of experience can architect a sound system (w/ scalability, quality & maintainability) in addition to being a good mentor to less senior engineers.

What is the point of asking "Trapping Rain Water" or "Median of two Sorted Arrays" question in the interview or any other random obscure algorithm to judge their ability as an engineer? How is that reflective of a "day to day" work performed by an engineer? Is memorization key job function?

Why can't one demonstrate their ability via their past work or projects? Why can't the question be more geared towards their ability to translate business requirement/task into code instead?

Interviews have become a beauty contest with previous contestants almost always are judges and this runs on a vicious loop with new cosmetic products (leetcode questions) being churned out every cycle. This sort of mental hazing doesn't help to prove if someone is qualified to do the job, rather if they can put the best swimsuit and makeup for the beauty contest.

Does the high TC justify this type of activity for the companies or is this a way to optimize their resource utilization? Further, why cry wolf for the shortage of talent in the industry when the method being used is half ass?

#google #facebook #microsoft #amazon #netflix #interview #engineering #software #swe

PS: Don't call yourself a senior engineer or a leader if you're not willing to take a chance and mentor new/junior engineers (1).

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