[gaius]

the interview process favors faster (by definition, younger) minds

Algo-on-the-whiteboard interviews favour people who have recently been cramming for their final-year CS exams - by SHEER COINCIDENCE they happen to be in their early 20s...

[hocuspocus]

I would even say they favor people who have been cramming algo-on-the-whiteboard type of questions. I mean, there are several businesses built around this (CtCI, leetcode, ...)

I know some North American universities have adapted to the practice and are now preparing students, but I assume this is relatively new. My algo and DS classes weren't about cramming at all.

Now to be fair, reasonable companies will focus on higher-level, systems design and architecture type of questions when interviewing seasoned engineers. Or at least, they really should.

[jonahrd]

Since everyone knows what they're getting into with a tech interview, I don't see why it's such a bad metric. Many companies purposefully give you a rubric/criteria to study. It's a good way of measuring whether a candidate can take the time to learn/prepare a specific set of knowledge, and then work through problems in a way that includes the interviewer (ie. other devs if hired) in the steps to solve the problem.

[hocuspocus]

> It's a good way of measuring whether a candidate can take the time to learn/prepare a specific set of knowledge

And how isn't that a terrible metric? Most of my current coworkers would fail as they simply don't have the time.

[Terr_]

> Since everyone knows what they're getting into with a tech interview, I don't see why it's such a bad metric. Many companies purposefully give you a rubric/criteria to study.

It's often so broad that to really cover everything that might come up you've got to have time to make the studying a part-time job.

And even then you might get hit with one of those "you almost have to have seen the trick before" questions, like detecting a cycle in a broken linked-list with O(1) memory.

[gaius]

Why interview in a way that's unrepresentative of the actual work?

The only reason is that you want to build an environment where the work is secondary, such as wanting to hire a bunch of bros to go drinking with and help you spend all that sweet VC cash...

[Terr_]

Exactly, it's the choice of evaluation criteria.

Meanwhile, experienced developers have their brains tuned towards on-the-job skills that are harder to cram (like an instinct for edge-cases) while "shelving" the stuff that you don't need.