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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I feel frustrated by the concept of software interview questions but only recently do I think I've figured out why. They feed my impostor syndrome.

They're often trivia that I'll never learn from my job, so if I didn't go to school for programming I won't know. Or they're specific to a domain I'll never touch so I won't know.

I don't think they're fundamentally bad (I used to), but I've never read one of these without coming out the other side feeling lower about myself.

Not sure I have a point. Just wanted to share.

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You have a perfectly valid point. After a PhD and 10 years of industry experience I interviewed at Google, mostly out of curiosity and because a former colleague recommended me.

I had never done an "algorithms" type interview before, had done no specific preparation, and was a bit baffled by being asked to do a coding exercise in a text editor whilst talking on the phone.

Since I was an "internal recommend" they gave me a second chance. Presumably because they were surprised at how badly I did. But the second interview was worse than the first.

I came away feeling quite humiliated.

Just out of curiosity: Are these kind of questions relevant/representative for the type of work that one does at Google?

Well, my reasoning at the time (2007) was that since my areas of expertise were machine learning and parallel processing, then if they wanted to hire people who knew low-level sorting and searching algorithms by heart, it wasn't the place for me.

I was surprised how one dimensional their process was. And I believe it may have changed since then. My former colleague did apologise when I related my experience and admitted that Google knew they had a problem with the process.

I know what you mean. Even if you think you are fairly competent, have a CS degree that is a few years back, reading these articles you only realise how many seemingly simple questions you probably could not answer correctly in an interview scenario. I try to let it motivate me, to try to stay on stop and play with these questions a bit, like going to the gym to stay fit and healthy, but imposter syndrome is real.

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