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Comment by nickff | Hacker News Reader

Those tests aren't really about engineering skill. The interviewer is checking to see how much you want the position, how hard of a worker you are, and how smart you are.

If you really want the position, you will put a lot of effort into researching what the interview will entail.

If you're a hard worker, you will intensively study for the interview.

If you're smart, you'll be able to apply the material you studied to the problem, and you'll probably realize the game you're playing.

None of these things is about 'engineering skill', which is much more difficult to discover, and only really valuable if the person is a smart, hard worker, who sticks around.

*edit: I am not saying that I like this style of interview, and when I interview job candidates, I never engage in this type of 'test'

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If Trivial Pursuit: Code Monkey and Engineering Edition is the interview game, that's not a place a sensible person would want to work.

A sensible knowledge and performance evaluation would involve pair coding on limited scope, immediate, real problems, not BS trivia.

Interviewing is a two-way street.. the signals given-off in the interview process should be taken in as a totality by the interviewee as well. If they see bad signs, they should run in the opposite direction rather than get sucked into a bad environment.

Well, I think it depends on what the rewards are for getting the job. If the pay, benefits, and accreditation (resume boost) from holding a position at a given company are sufficiently valuable, it is definitely rational to play the game.

Full disclosure; I have never done an interview like this, or tried to land a job at a major 'tech' company, though I do have a degree in engineering.

I think I might have found a hack - a way to work for $large_tech, not to have to move to the west coast, work remotely and not be required to do leetCode - work in the cloud consulting division of either Microsoft or Amazon. I’ll know by the end of May if it works.

I had the same attitude pre-Covid. My local market (Atlanta) has completely tanked. There are still jobs out there, but salaries have imploded and I don’t think they are coming back for a couple of years.

If I didn’t have any other option besides the standard r/cscareerquestions “Learn leetCode and work for a FAANG” , I would.

This is one of the reasons I haven't applied to work at Amazon, even though I'm sure I could do the work. The signal they're sending by interviewing this way says "We want people who are willing to put up with bullshit".

This comment implies leverage that the OP probably doesn't have though. Everyone is picky to the extent that they can be.

Yep. When I interviewed at Google the recruiter suggested I study up on algorithms, data structures, sorting, graphs, recursion. They even offered a Candidate Coaching Session where you could do practice interviews. It felt like they were optimizing for people that were willing to put a lot of time into preparation .

But if you're capable and smart, you wouldn't normally waste lots of your time memorising details you could easily look up and use in moments if you ever needed them.

Are those interview processes really optimising for candidates who are willing and able to spend silly amounts of time creating an illusion of being super-keen?

It's amazing that it just took one startup to sway the majority opinion that trivia-as-job-interview is a good barometer of job success.

Not even five years ago this style of interviewing was looked down upon by most.

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