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Comment by snorkel | Hacker News Reader

One of FANGs I interviewed at, I couldn’t help noticing they totally avoid asking practical questions that require field experience to understand and instead just focus the entire interview on CompSci college homework problems that recent grads can easily relate to. I wonder why. Hmmmmm ...

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To be fair, recent grads also have an enormous amount of trouble breaking into the industry. The prisoner's dilemma of training up the graduate at a negative return for 2 years before watching them get poached is an issue that's been thoroughly canvassed around here. I think it's beneficial to the health of the industry that tech giants are at least somewhat willing to calibrate their hiring processes towards that class of applicant and take on that risk, and I hope they don't move away from that just to even further pad the career prospects of people with 5-10 years' experience.

Yeah, but... CompSci college homework... really isn't that hard? I mean, with some coaching and effort, I can study enough get most of those questions even though my math abilities top out somewhere around high school trig.

I mean, they are gating some incredibly high-paying jobs. Sure, you gotta jump through some hoops to get it, but I'd argue that the coding tests are... well, they certainly aren't the hoops I find difficult.

> Yeah, but... CompSci college homework... really isn't that hard?

Don't know. To me, college CompSci material might as well be greek. But I somehow get by programming...

Now - if we want to talk about contrapuntal music composition techniques - I'm your guy.

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