[iainmerrick]

I'm not sure I understand your point -- possibly we're agreeing?

To clarify, it seems to me the interviews tend to focus on things like "what's a good data structure for the social network in a Facebook clone?" but that's only 1% of the actual job, 5% tops.

It's true that those technical design decisions are very important, but they're not decisions that every engineer needs to make on their own on a day-to-day basis. They come up fairly rarely in a typical project and usually multiple people will be involved.

I don't have any easy answers -- I don't know a good way to interview for the other 95%+ of useful skills, like communicating well within a team, testing, debugging, benchmarking, writing documentation, good source control practice, knowledge of standard tools, meta-knowledge of how to learn about standard tools, how to evaluate new tools, system administration, dealing with production panics, etc.

[tetraodonpuffer]

my point was more along the lines that even if you need to figure out cool algorithms as part of your job, interviews as they are now don't seem to be not testing for that, but more for "can you rote learn these specific algorithms".

I think some of this was why some time ago there was a way of interviews with "off the wall" questions, but those seemed to be fairly vilified so I guess that's why they aren't as common now, but personally I would get more of an understanding in how somebody thinks by giving them an unexpected question than by asking them something they could've studied for.