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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

Interviews are designed to be roughly the same experience for everyone. There's plenty of good legal reasons why, but separate from that, jobs, roles and so on are not standardized across various companies. While I personally know someone with 8 years experience at Facebook probably isn't a clown, the point of an interview is also to get a sense of how you'd work together and to ask eachother questions. A good interviewer will tailor their interview to the candidate, too.

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with respect, this is just lazy, following the herd because everybody else is doing it. Somewhere around 2010, a group of xooglers started selling CTCI (Cracking the Coding Interview)

They single-handedly fucked hiring for the entire industry.

Many of my peers have found success and homes with outstanding companies with wonderful culture that have abandoned this archaic interviewing process. cling to it if you must, but it is broken beyond repair and people are starting to trend away from it.

> Somewhere around 2010, a group of xooglers started selling CTCI (Cracking the Coding Interview)

> They single-handedly fucked hiring for the entire industry.

I'm not sure about single-handedly. I think you can blame the creators of LeetCode as well :-)

It definitely changed the game - or at least, made it something you can practice for easily in one place. But there's nothing particularly special about leetcode that you couldn't find in your college coursework. A lot of companies tend to optimize for college-level questions, but this isn't true across the industry. I used leetcode when interviewing for my most recent job too, by the way.

Apologies if this comes off short, I'm actively involved in hiring now, and have been at a lot of tech companies. I do my best to help keep the process at minimum consistent. Bringing in the right people is never easy, but is incredibly critical to the success of your business.

Happy to answer questions, though.

I seriously doubt companies who have been coding interview for years now are for legal reasons.

Not coding interviews specifically for legal reasons no, but consistency of interview. If you ask one person a coding question, you should probably do the same for everyone, otherwise you expose yourself to legal liability. This is especially true the larger the company you are interviewing at - and the more generic the role is internally.

You don’t need to adopt this style to avoid discrimination.

Not to avoid discrimination, of course, but to avoid folks suing you for not getting the job - or at least making it easy if/when they do. These are two separate things. Folks tend to get touchy about being told 'no' again especially the bigger your company is. Frankly, interviews will always be imperfect because few will respond in that situation the way they do at the office. This tends to hurt egos.

That this is a sufficient but not necessary solution does not discredit it in the way your tone implies.

>If you ask one person a coding question, you should probably do the same for everyone, otherwise you expose yourself to legal liability.

No! This does not mean you must interview Jr engineers and Sr engineers identically!

You can drop the leet coding requirements for experienced candidates and have no legal worries as long as all similarly experienced candidates are interviewed and judged similarly. It's actually extremely common for companies to have different interviews for different experience levels.

Sorry for the confusion, I was referring to everyone at the same level of seniority.

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