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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Provided one can go through the silliness of fitting golf balls into planes, or going through the algorithms and data structures books from 30 years ago.

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It's not all like that, but yeah there's a lot of artificialness to interviews and there always has been.

What field has interviews without silliness like this. Jobs for lawyers in 1950 when all that mattered was your father and your alma mater? Hard pass.

I would take a interview premised on a know, learnable challenge (even if silly) over one that exclusively relied on what college you went to.

At work we do both. If you pass the somewhat artificial interviews we invite you for a trial week of 3-5 days working with the actual team on actual real work (a somewhat contained feature or problem).

Lets us evaluate people in real conditions and visa versa.

That only works for unemployed people.

In Germany for example, that isn't allowed, and there is the whole insurance discussion if something happens to someone that shouldn't be there as employee in first place.

It also works for people willing to take time off (PTO or otherwise). We do lose some people who aren't willing to do the trial, but that's considered acceptable. People who do the work trial and accept an offer are much more likely to stick around (much lower rate of mistakes on their part and our part.)

I'm laughing a bit at Germany, but Europe in general has lost the plot when it comes to innovation.

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