Do mathematiticans have to interiview like this? Medical doctors? Police officers? Rocket scientists? Chemists? Architects? I cant think off a single profession apart from the IT domain that does this.
I dont think there is a single profession that gets mocked on their interviewing strategies as much as IT still I see senior devs defending this insanity.
We either have to start requiring the same level of formal certification we require of other engineering professions or we have to deal with these types of interviews.
Previous comment on the subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37989386
I've worked a lot in civil engineering, and honestly the worst working civil engineer I've worked with was still a lot better at their job than the worst working programmer I've worked with.
I suppose some kind of certification can set something of a minimum baseline, but I don't know – colour me skeptical.
The dichotomy lies in the fact IT and programming are not professions.
All of the professions you listed, you have to go to school for. For most of them, there is a body overseeing training, qualifications and conduct of the professionals, barring them from practicing for malpractice.
How do you evaluate Bob, a self-taught, remote developer, with no public projects, with 10 years of experience in no-name companies? You give them a real-world task and see how they do.
Even if I agreed with your premise that the prevailing paradigm is necessary for Bob (spoiler: I don't agree), I would rather it not be for Alice.
Alice might have the qualifications you listed, but never worked in fintech startups and therefore needs additional probing. Bob on the other hand might have none of those qualifications, but has worked exclusively in fintech startups, and would therefore require different evaluation.
This kind of context-appropriate evaluation ofcourse becomes prohibitively expensive when you're filling hundreds of positions per month.
I've done loads of interviews of "engineers" who could barely program at all. A short test like this can remove them completely and then you just need one discussion interview for the handful of candidates that remain.
I do agree that this probably has no value for the company. They could implement this easily themselves. Now, if they would give a different arithmetic operation to each applicant...
If your goal is to remove the bullshitters wouldn't a 5-10 minute, slightly harder than FizzBuzz, test also remove them just accurately and save everybody a bunch of time.
My take: There's some extreme sampling bias at play. Everyone knows at least one horror story where someone managed to bullshit their way to a position. Now they imagine that this must be a problem, while ignoring the vast majority of devs they've worked with that were legitimate developers.
The field of software engineering is also much more personal and opinionated than traditional engineering. This lowers the threshold for what devs. will classify as "frauds" - not because the people they accuse might actually be frauds, but because they are not up to their standards.
IT and SWE is very much unique in that they:
1) Ask highly specific technical questions
2) Require you to arrive at some optimal solution
It's very open ended and the notion of "optimal" doesn't really apply.
I was just commenting on the more general electrode approach to interviewing, which is endemic to the SWE sector.
Actually, this works in IT as well: if Donald Knuth, Yann LeCun or Zvi Gallil ever decide (however unlikely) to apply to a web shop, they'll probably get waved through on the strength of their credentials. For the self-taught J. Random Hacker, who can't show any of his old code because it's under NDA, there's the interview pipeline.
The awful thing though is that you’re not allowed to show your old employers’ code. And most of it is teamwork.
Even though the real-life work tasks could have catastrophic or extremely expensive consequences. As in shut down production on an oil rig.
I've also worked as an analyst / data scientist, and didn't see too many leetcode-like questions there either.
I think one big reason for this is that other professions have some quality assurance of their candidates through their education or certification. Whereas many companies are open to hire self-taught and similar people...yeah, I'm not 100% convinced about that either, because somehow companies will assume that a CS grad candidate can't code for shit, whereas traditional engineering companies will assume that a engineering grad candidate knows something.
It seems to be unique to IT
Architects bring a portfolio, and walk through it. And licensed architects have a majorly huge ordeal of a licensing process. After obtaining an accredited degree, you have to get signoff on performing 3,740 work hours in six areas of architecture practice (AXP, architectural experience program). You may need to work at multiple firms to get this experience, since not all firms do all types of architecture work.
You'll also need to take the ARE (Architect Registration Exam) and any state suplemental exams. The ARE is actually 6 separate exams, the shortest is 2 hours 40 minutes; total test time is almost 20 hours, but with breaks you're looking at 24 hours 20 minuted total appointment time. Most candiates prep and take one test at a time, but you've got a 5 year rolling window to pass them all, and the tests change from time to time. I'm not looking up how long the California suplimental exam takes, but I'm guessing it's at least a couple hours.
Some of the test is multiple choice stuff, but there's interview based tests and probably some practical work.
If you're thinking of becoming an architect because interviewing will be more straight forward, let me save you some of your life and say, don't do it. Anyway, most of the fun work is delegated to juniors/interns; if you want to make reasonable money, you've got to get up to partner, and then you're only doing client relations and very little design.
I took a government provided standardized test of computer knowledge to work at a school district in 1997, and it was full of useless questions about early 1980s tech. I can only imagine the depths of forgotten knowledge that would be needed for a Software Developer certification program. How many hours of debugging BASIC or bringing up a 68000 board from scratch would we all have to do in our work experience program? Or formal methods: in my 20+ year career, I've never gotten anything remotely close to a specification that could be used for formal methods, but I bet I'd need to get work hours and study up for the test.