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Comment by holidayacct | Hacker News Reader

If you're working on a large scale project you wouldn't be implementing a specific algorithm by yourself anyway. You'd be discussing a specific problem and then discussing the pros and cons of different algorithms that you want to implement and implementing POCs in different algorithms. The interview is just to see if you can think and discuss in terms of algorithms and data structures.

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Technical interviews problems do sometimes actually resemble some discussions that happen in the real world however there are two major problems that I see in the interview space that don't have clear solutions:

1) one or two people in the discussion (interviewers) already know the perfect solution to the problem and are contributing as little as possible to the discussion.

2) the actual amount of allotted time to brainstorm a solution to the problem is realistically only ~10 minutes not the ~45 minutes you are allotted because of the time it takes to implement the solution with real code.

It would be nice if no one in the interview knew the answer to the problem before starting the discussion and this discussion would be pretty realistic aside from the lack of help from the interviewers. However, you cannot easily/fairly compare candidates with so many different questions.

Technical interviews would also be far more realistic if they allotted more time for problem solving but I imagine if the standard 45 minutes was bumped to over an hour, the only outcome is that more candidates would perform very well and that's not an outcome companies actually want unfortunately.

I'm completely in favor of randomized interview questions. My personal favorite approach is a two-way interview. You get to ask a technical interview question of the person you're interviewing with. If they ask you a ridiculous question, they get hit with a ridiculous question also. As an employer you could monitor this and see if you're employees are giving unfair questions to candidates they can't answer themselves. It would also be a good idea for HR to record all of these interviews so they can have someone knowledgeable judge the interview process and track the performance of new hires versus the questions they are asking. If the interviewer starts having problems answering their own difficulty level in questions then maybe they should be looking for a new job also. I was once asked a ridiculous question and threw an interviewer off by asking them how many times they had actually implemented something like they were asking, they stopped talking immediately.

My personal opinion is that all of this should be scrapped in favor of seeing what the person has produced and having them partially implement a solution of something they have written in the past. It is a virtual impossibility that anyone could work on a project of any sort without being able to sit down for an 8 hour interview where they are responsible for partially re-creating something they have worked on in the past. To this day I still remember large parts of source code I've worked on 10 years in the past.

> the only outcome is that more candidates would perform very well and that's not an outcome companies actually want unfortunately

Why would this be the case--at places where the number of candidates far exceed positions? This is the exception rather than the common case.

Pick up a neuroscience book and you're going to quickly find out why your statement isn't possible. Have you ever had to conduct tech interviews or spoken to people who have? Tech interviews are the biggest crapshoot you'll ever see, for every 100 interviews you'll be lucky to find a single person who can code fizz buzz on the fly, introduce a small variation in fizz buzz that requires them to be able to read their own code and they can't modify their own code. The number of people who have a long enough short term memory and can concentrate on a single thing for three hours straight is exceedingly small.

Even the very best tech companies are constantly filtering through thousands of people who claim to have worked on extremely complicated development projects but can't code extremely simple things.

Yeah larger desirable companies already have no shortage of well performing candidates to choose from so why make the interview more fair in any way? That would just make selection more difficult for them. Smaller companies might not have this issue but will probably follow the practices of larger, more successful companies anyway.

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