[rsp1984]

I've done a fair amount of interviews in my professional career, both as an engineer at Google as well as for my own startup.

In an eng. interview you want to maximize information divided by time, i.e. you want to learn as much as possible about whether the candidate would be a good fit for the company and spend as little time as possible doing so (because you have other things to do -- such as interviewing more candidates).

In my experience these kind of interview questions have a very poor information by time ratio. They are poor on information because they may give you an idea how well the candidate can do on puzzle questions but not so much how the candidate would do on actual real-world assignments. And they are especially poor on the denominator (time) because you are probably going to spend at least 1h with the candidate before you get past the obvious stuff.

Also I guess about 70% of (pre-qualified) candidates would outright fail the question, so if you let this influence your hiring decision, given that the question is really quite "puzzly", you're inevitably going to miss out on a lot of talent (the kind that does well on actual work assignments).

[rajeshpant]

Also, it depends on the interviewer. I have been on both sides of the table and I can tell that as an interviewer you need to convey these type of questions very clearly. A interview is typically 45 minutes in most companies, where about 5-10 minutes are wasted in introduction etc. You have about 35 minutes and if you waste 15-20 minutes explaining a problem to the candidate and in the end leave the candidate with 15-20 minutes to solve a dynamic programming question, then it is very unfair on your part.

Most companies in bay area have 3-4 whiteboard interview rounds and I have experienced at least 1 interview, at every place I interviewed(FANG and other top bay area tech companies), where the interviewer wasted enough time either explaining the problem.

As an interviewer, it is really important to keep the time aspect in mind and choose a problem which could be easily explained. The problem itself could be hard, but story based problems waste candidate's time and have little value in assessing the ability of the candidate.

PS: I interviewed at one of the tech companies(the one you all know and I won't name), and in one of the technical rounds, it took the interviewer 20 minutes explaining the problem. The problem basically boiled down to finding largest number at any time in a given sequence without sorting the array. The problem had a background story of some cell towers where each tower had a strength and blah blah. The interviewer was also had communication issues.

[monksy]

> where about 5-10 minutes are wasted in introduction etc.

That tells me a lot of concerning things about the organization. If you're considering that it's "wasted time." You're missing out on a lot of important information there.

[xyzzyz]

If you interview at place like Google, introductions only really serve to make the candidate more comfortable. As an interviewer, even if the candidate gets and takes the job, you are unlikely to meet him or her again anyway, in a company so large. The introductions won’t give you any valuable hiring information, because you won’t be serving on the hiring committee anyway, and hiring committee won’t care about your opinion about candidate’s experience. I feel that spending more than 5 minutes on it is a waste of candidates time, time in which they could be showing the skill that is meant to be tested at the interview.

[azinman2]

Or the individual. Large companies are made up of many heterogenous people.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I very much disagree with this assessment, the reason being that, as an interviewer, the least important part for me is whether or not the interviewee "gets" the problem initially. I have no problem giving the interviewee tons of hints about (a) it's a dynamic programming problem and (b) what the different cases are.

At that point though, what I'm really interested in, and what I think tells me a ton of valuable information about the candidate, is how capably they are then able to turn the algorithm into actual code. With many folks you can basically tell them the entire recursive steps that are necessary and they still can't translate this into workable code. "How fast can you turn algorithm into code" is one of the critical skills for all developers, and these kinds of problems give me good insight into that skill.

[acadavid]

> I don't care if the candidate "gets" the problem

> "How fast can you turn algorithm into code" is one of the critical skills of all developers.

I don't understand this industry anymore. If I have anything to say about software is that solving the right problems is the main skill in an Engineer. Then, figuring out an algorithm is the hard part of solving any problem, turning it into code is usually never as hard (except for technical nuances) and especially, not how quickly it becomes code. Not sure how someone can value "how fast can you turn algorithm into code" over "understanding/solving the right problem".

[barrkel]

Yup. Building up a shared understanding of a potential solution, and then fluency in converting that shared understanding into code, is my goal from a code pairing interview.

Crucially, I don't think it's important to have critical insight into the problem and come up with a solution unaided. We don't work alone - if we can come up with a solution together, and the candidate can be trusted to implement the solution, it's what we need.

[bitL]

Most of the interviews are just technology-wrapped ways to confirm our initial biases about whether we like that person or not. One could ace an interview but if that person is not liked/relatable, they won't get the job. OTOH when we like somebody, we try to help even if the person is not up to required level. The only exception I can think of is when a team needs to hire a scapegoat before performance review to be fired when the expected axe lands on the team and somebody has to go. I've seen this played out at Google, FB, MS etc., regardless of what each company thought about its "scientific" interview process.

Next time on interview just for fun try to ace all technical questions but contradict some interviewer's notions held in high regard (those could be usually inferred pretty quickly during initial conversation); I am 99% sure you won't get the job. Then on another one make yourself just average tech performer but amplify agreeability with the interviewer's ideas. What would you guess would give you (much) better success ratio?

[paxy]

> Also I guess about 70% of (pre-qualified) candidates would outright fail the question

This is probably right. Companies still use these questions, though, because they do a good job failing candidates who are not technical enough for the role.

What you're essentially doing is filtering out bad candidates and selecting from good ones based on luck.

[hikarudo]

In other words, the companies are optmizing for precision, rather than recall, which makes sense.

[ghettoimp]

I've done a lot of interviewing and participated in a lot of hiring decisions at a very large tech company.

I think our process is guided far more by tradition than deliberate optimization for anything in particular. :)

[dahart]

> In my experience these kind of interview questions have a very poor information by time ratio. They are poor on information because they may give you an idea how well the candidate can do on puzzle questions but not so much how the candidate would do on actual real-world assignments.

I agree with you quite a bit, but to me it looks like there's some assumption buried in there that the only reason to ask interview questions is to evaluate individual performance on heads-down coding problems, which is not necessarily representative of a real work environment.

The information I look for when interviewing includes: How do people behave when asked questions they don't know? How will a candidate act in meetings? How curious is the candidate when faced with a tough question? Do they verbalize their thought process? Do they start making things up and/or try to appear like they know the answer when they don't? Do they gravitate towards certain kinds of problems? Do they ask questions or try to tough it out alone?

I've never asked a DP problem in an interview, but I do like to try to get an idea of the candidate's limits and boundaries, so I try to ramp up the difficulty until we hit questions they have trouble with. (I do warn them in advance.) I don't really want to hear correct answers to simple questions, I want to see how far they can get before they get stuck. I also want to hire people smarter than me.

If you only look for coding efficiency in a candidate, then yes, your information over time ratio might be low. (And it might be surprisingly low for all your questions.) But if you expand the kinds of information you collect to include social factors, behavior, knowledge limits, and more, then it's really not that bad.