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Comment by estomagordo | Hacker News Reader

Or, you know, they're smart problem solvers and don't need to rely on memorizing.

Is that what you really end up testing though? As parent mentioned this can be broken by simply memorising, so are you sure the candidate is a good problem solver or are they just good parrots?

So I think it's actually evolved into a weird sort of test of conscientiousness. Originally the idea was probably that we will test people's abstract problem solving skills. Can they come up with a solution on the fly? Ok, now can they figure out any clever optimizations?

But at this point it is sort of expected that if you are interviewing with a FAANG you will be getting these sorts of questions (and they tell you that up front), so it becomes a sort of test of "is this person willing to spend 10 hours preparing for an interview"?

Yeah I suspect this is the case, the original intention and structure was solid but it's been progressively shifted into that FAANG space. I think the only solution is probably a question tailor made to the company interviewing, that doesn't rely on leetcode-style approaches to solve.

10 hours? Preparing for FAANG interviews requires months of preparation.

I hardly think a solid interview question can be solved through memorization.

I’ve had interviewers ask about cycle detection in a linked list. The answer was of course the classic tortoise and hare algorithm. Which took ~15 years to come up with, and was found by a Turing award winner.

Anybody who claimed they “came up with the algorithm themselves” in a few minutes in an interview is a liar, and anyone who takes them at their word is a fool.

Well, it's not a rocket science algorithm. But regardless, it's a very bad interview question indeed.

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