[convolvatron]

I'm a pretty senior developer. I really don't mind doing coding questions. after all, thats what we do, isn't it? As someone mentioned there are plenty of people that are good at projecting experience without actually being very effective at their jobs.

Whats annoying and disappointing is if the questions are at such a low level that there is little room to shine. You leave after your day not feeling as if the employer gained any understanding about you, and you certainly weren't able to get a read on your prospective peers.

The purely conversational interviews almost invariably lead to disappointment for me. The company is so desperate to fill a slot that they ask you probing questions about your work style. They spin grand portraits of exciting collaborations, novel development techniques, fundamental problems of concurrency and consistency. In the end they just want someone to respond to minor bug reports in their massive taped together codebase and make sure the servers stay up.

[Waterluvian]

The part that I fear is the seemingly cookie cutter questions for CS grads, not for developers for that position. I've been doing software dev for almost 3 years. Never had to implement a red black tree. Nor could I, since I never took CS at school.

I'm very good at my job but would bomb the technical part of many of the traditional interviews.

[sanderjd]

I'm not the biggest fan of the algorithm-theory centric hiring regime, but "implement a red black tree" is a straw man. Even the most CSy interviews are at the level of contiguous vs. linked data structures, binary trees, and recursion, not at the level of very specific algorithms with intricate details like red black trees.

[mavelikara]

> I'm not the biggest fan of the algorithm-theory centric hiring regime, but "implement a red black tree" is a straw man.

I think it comes from the "Get that job at Google" blog post[1] by Steve Yegge. It is not clear what Steve means here, but he wrote:

  You should be familiar with at least one flavor of balanced 
  binary tree, whether it's a red/black tree, a splay tree or 
  an AVL tree. You should actually know how it's implemented.

I understand the gist of a R-B tree, I can probably write the immutable one on a whiteboard, but I don't think I will ever be able to implement the mutable insert/delete methods on a whiteboard. I have never been asked it in an interview yet, though.

[1]: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...

[gaius]

That question is a filter for "recent graduate" i.e. young, without setting off any HR alarm bells.

[convolvatron]

you know. thats legit. some people will respect that and find other questions to ask that will convince them that you'll help them out alot.

and some people will be disgusted, and they probably aren't that great to work with. it would be sad if you couldn't find a job, but i doubt thats the case :)

[madracerx]

I bet you do mind, specially if they ask you to do these on the whiteboard. What we do has nothing to do with basic CS questions... unless you have a very unique job. It can be done conversational if you know how to conduct an interview. Unfortunately, this is a skill that most programmers lack. best way is to pair program on a real world problem. Get your candidate to pair on fixing a bug on your system.