I will never subject one of my potential hires to this nonsense. These concepts are valuable and academically interesting, for sure, but for the practical kind of engineering that's done at most companies it's simply not needed. Either that or it's already implemented in a library.
What a waste of time.
What I'm saying is: unless these students just want to sit around repeating their DS&A course(s) over and over again the rest of their lives, this sort of interview, job, and prep course is counterproductive in the long term.
Required viewing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDEpeWQHtFU
Take home assignments are easy to cheat on and take a lot of time.
Asking questions about someone's experience is a great way to find someone who is a great conversationalist that can't code.
Asking someone to program at a computer in a limited amount of time falls victim to the same issues that the competitive programming, whiteboard interviews currently do.
In fact, if you want to hire a great software engineer, you can't do that reliably with any of these interview techniques. If your interview can be studied for, you aren't going to fight great software engineers. At best, you can find someone who will do the job.
A mediocre software engineer.
Does performance on these tasks correlate with performance on the job? Is it easy to measure this performance in interviews reliably? Then it's going to be used by companies.
Technical interview performance has ~0 correlation with performance on the job? I find it hard to believe. Is the mean performance on the job of a software engineer that fails to pass Google interviews as good as one that does? Why do most companies want to hire Google software engineers if that is the case?
As for my second question, it should have been "is it easi-er to measure this performance reliably than other skills that may be relevant"? It sounds like this would be hard to answer. But this kind of interview seems to be best suited for repeatable evaluation (although, of course, you do have the problem that people will prepare and bias the results, but I don't see how you can avoid that if you want a repeatable way to measure performance).
Finally, "and companies use them in spite of that". Any guesses why?
Google had a study that has been linked to death around here which showed the scores hires received on their interviews didn't correlate to job performance ratings. There are of course biases and flaws in that study, but it underscores another separate point: studies should show they do correlate, not the other way around (prove a negative).
> Finally, "and companies use them in spite of that". Any guesses why?
Bandwagon effect, cargo cults, ego boosting/confirmation bias from applying a hazing ritual, laziness all come to mind.
Maybe not, but the ones who lack the ability to do so will also tend to be the coworker who constantly asks you and others inane questions, dragging down the team's productivity as a whole.
I don't believe cheating is such a major concern. The applicant should be able to talk about their solution and all the choices they made if they actually wrote it and understand the solution.