[akhilcacharya]

I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint but looking at the cost/benefit for a Stanford student I think the benefit to studying for these interviews is clear - its a bit of a simplification, but for Facebook if you can do 3-6 problems over the course of 2 60 minute internship interviews you have the ability to get a $75k-$100k signing bonus if you convert to full time in addition to more shares over 4 years. Granted this depends on whether you're a high performer during the internship but I definitely understand why someone would make or take this class.

[sidlls]

I recently got a promotion to management. I have different responsibilities, but I get paid more and have more influence over solutions to interesting engineering and technical problems. This role feels even more like what my engineer friends in real engineering disciplines do than my role as Lead did: leverage their education and experience to solve complex, large scale problems. These interviews are good at testing for jobs in software that have as an analog jobs in real engineering equivalent disciplines consisting of computing CRC integrals by hand all day.

What I'm saying is: unless these students just want to sit around repeating their DS&A course(s) over and over again the rest of their lives, this sort of interview, job, and prep course is counterproductive in the long term.

[jdiaz5513]

Careful. Software engineering is very much a real engineering discipline, and it is a major cultural failing to not recognize it as such.

Required viewing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDEpeWQHtFU

[sidlls]

It should operate like a real engineering discipline. My point is in many ways it does not.

[tedd4u]

Thanks for sharing this +1