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Comment by devoutsalsa | Hacker News Reader

If you ask me a question that boils down to “write a card shuffling algorithm”, I’m going to do less well because I’m being taxed by the thought of “Why is this person asking me to shuffle a deck of virtual cards?” During the interview, I’d probably just google “best algorithm for shuffling deck of cards in <language>”, and I’d tell you I was looking it up. If you tasked me with shuffling cards on the job, that’s what I’d do.

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You could just ask, and we'd answer "it's just a simple problem so both of us can see what it's like to work together." You'd be surprised how many people show up who don't actually know how to write a for loop.

And if you didn't like the experience you wouldn't want to work for us so the interview would be a success too.

> don't actually know how to write a for loop

My god, yes. We had a two-part problem that we used for the "work skills" part of the interview. Part 1 boiled down to writing a two-level nested for loop that was simpler than fizzbuzz. Part 2 was using that loop to solve the rest of the problem, which was far more complex. I lost track of how many candidates spent 40 of the 50 minutes just writing that loop.

you don't actually believe that "work together" crap do you? You realize you're dangling a job over their head, right? There is a power imbalance. You'll never see "work together" in an interview because you're not colleagues on equal footing.

Often candidates already have a job and are looking to see if they want a change. There's parity in such situations.

Come up with better problems, please.

What would you recommend?

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