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Comment by nathanfig | Hacker News Reader

Some people are very good at BSing their way through interviews, even technical ones. Those people also end up being very difficult to fire and are generally poisonous to culture. Asking them to code is a great filter, it’s hard to fool a compiler. It shouldn’t be the only filter, but for coding roles a coding interview is pretty critical.

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Asking them to code is indeed a great filter. But is Dynamic Programming question necessary to perform the filter?

Facebook and other companies banned Dynamic Programming.

What?

Is this a recent thing? I still got them two years ago.

No idea. That's what I heard from a eng manager at FAANG 2 months ago. He said "We don't ask DP questions, they don't resemble problems that you are expected to do while working. You can still some of the problems using DP, but we don't ask pure DP problems."

Yes, we don't ask DP questions. (I work at FB)

How are people in the US difficult to fire?

Because attorneys know how deep the employer's pockets are, which gives them a great incentive to pull out all the stops, which gives corp HR the incentive to make sure there is a long and painful performance management process before anyone can be fired without it exposing the company to too much risk.

This doesn't apply to right-to-work states. Nuance is required in an argument like this. For nealy half the country, "hard to fire" is bullshit FUD. It's another excuse to be lazy in interviewing and follow FAANG in lock step.

"right-to-work" means you can't be forced to join a union. It has nothing to do with this.

Having lived and worked in a right to work state all my life, your comment does not ring true for my experience. Employees can be members of a "protected class" (one of which is simply being over age 40) which is often the core of an improper firing civil suit.

In other words, firing people in the US just costs money. Not very much, usually.

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