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Comment by skuhn | Hacker News Reader

Thinking that something is beneath me (which is not what I said, by the way) and feeling that the interviewers have undervalued my skillset are two different things entirely.

During an interview, I'm interviewing the interviewers as well as being interviewed. Part of that process (for me) is to see if they have correctly identified my skill level (in my opinion), so that hopefully they have the right kind of position in mind for me.

The name of a position is often meaningless, unless you know the inner workings of that organization. "Senior" is meaningless window dressing. It's how the role fits within the team that determines if it's right for me and if I will be able to have the kind of impact I want.

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Try to put yourself in the shoes of the interviewer. You got to interview lots of clueless people who call themselves programmers but are unable to do the simplest task. Once you spoke with enough people like that, the first thing you want to do is weed out the people who can't program, hence the FizzBuzz question.

Now, I am sure that you, skuhn are able to do those simple things, but the guy interviewing you doesn't know it. If he asks you a simple question that you can nail in 5 minutes, and answer "sorry dude, your question is so easy I find it offending", the interviewer will think you're an arrogant douche - that's how I would feel at least. Instead, just solve the problem he's asking you and move on.

If after that he keeps asking stupid questions, well, it's a different story and you probably wouldn't fit well in that company.

I feel like you're assigning feelings to me that don't mesh with what my comment described. I don't want to get into a personal thing, but here's my condensed point again one last time, in the hope of clarifying:

I think this question is suitable for phone screening. You should already know if someone can do the work equivalent of tying their shoes before bringing them on-site. If I was asked a question at this level during an on-site interview, I would be a little disappointed. If the entire interview continued in that vein, I wouldn't accept the position.

Questions like this can work in a phone screen if you have a shared virtual whiteboard. Otherwise it is painful for the interviewer to try to transcribe code as the candidate thinks of it and says it alout.

There is also the common problem where candidates google for answers or at least seem to google for answers during phone screens.

The problem with asking truly challenging coding questions during an interview is that they are often too challenging to finish in the time allotted. Frequently challenging coding questions require an ahah moment or domain knowledge. For example if an interviewer asks a candidate to invent an advanced algorithm on the spot what is being measured? If the candidate gets the answer right they might be really smart, they more likely have been previously exposed to the idea, or they got lucky. If they got the answer wrong the interviewer must judge them on their ability to communicate their thought process during their attempt - but from that the interviewer didn't learn if they can code.

You shouldn't be disappointed that interviewers don't know straight away that you aren't a charlatan. You should instead be disappointed by the fact that there is such a high number of successful charlatans in our industry.

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