Comment by 62951413
3 years ago
In the last 20 years I have seen mostly ultra-fast depreciation of SE _interviewing_ skills.
After the first ten years software development becomes quite intuitive and you internalize all those best practices. You can be trusted to start a new service from an empty git repository. Later it gets incremental, there's a lot of path dependency in languages and frameworks and few things come out of the blue. Those that do are frequently intellectually stimulating to learn.
But interviews have been steadily getting strange and difficult (in a way not related to real life software development), at least in the last 10 years.
Very true. This stuff started at places like Google and Facebook and it makes a sort of sense for them as right or wrong they're very focused on hiring new college grads. With no real work experience to speak of you can do a lot worse than hire the ones that show they can apply their CS coursework to leetcode problems.
But doing the same to workers with 10 years of real world experience doesn't make nearly as much sense. Like hiring medical doctors by quizzing them on organic chemistry problems. Google and Facebook do it because they can and they don't know what else to do, but I don't understand how it became a universal practice.
Yeah. I agree. I have "Cracking the Coding Interview" on my bookshelf. There's a lot of very good stuff in it. I enjoy thumbing through it. But I keep waving it at my boss saying "I will _not_ do this to people with several years of experience ~ This book is _not_ going to be my blueprint for interviewing"