[dryajov]

Honestly, I believe the industry is cannibalizing it self, and this sort of practices is pushing out more and more creative and capable people. When I have to make a choice of whether to practice my algorithms or work on my open source project, is when things are going to start blowing up. This industry is built by people with passion and dedication, some of the most powerful and defining projects were built by individuals who sacrificed their spare time to build something useful, now they will sacrifice that time to practice... Algos? C'mon!!! I think our industry has passed the initial honey moon period, when crazy and beautiful solutions crystalized in garages and basements all across the county and the world, and we're headed for a bumpy landing were big corps control open source and the crazies that made them possible are pushed out. This is not sustainable on the long run, and pretty soon were going to be regulated to oblivion. Bye bye innovation.

[bogomipz]

Good points. I know how I want to spend my time - working on something creative not "training up" for a potential interview. Companies only started doing the "throw the CLRS book at them" style interviews when they found out that was Google was doing. I'm sure Google has their own reasons for that. However why would a smallish start up want to emulate what works for a company that has 65K employees? This whole training up for Google/FB/MS/AWS style interviews has actually given rise to a cottage industry that has sprouted up around helping you train - "Cracking the Coding interview"/Hacker Rank etc. I would rather hire someone that:

A) Has good experience

B) Has the ability to reason about problem domains even if they can't scribble out a perfect implementation with all edge cases considered on a white board in under 30 minutes.

C) Has good interpersonal skills.

[stuxnet79]

Ha, I'm in this exact predicament. I'm having a lot of fun working on my side-project during evenings but if I'm to stay employable I understand I'm going to also have to refresh my memory on algo fundamentals. But this is much lower priority to me right now and I agree with you that interviews are getting ridiculous.