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by soft_shortcut 2694 days ago
Who knows? Maybe all tech companies came to an agreement one day, a little secret we don't know about. Why do they all require that type of interviews? Employee retention... If interviews for software engineers were focusing on real work experience only, everyone would be able to switch jobs very easily. Think about it. It would be so easy to get in without even putting extra work because you'd be evaluated on your day to day tasks, rather than something that requires months of intensive practice. It's a way to scare engineers and to keep them away from switching jobs.

Now let's say you don't have any experience and you're fresh out of college. What happens with today's setup? Well, you're perfectly able to tackle these interviews since all you know are algorithms, data structures, etc. There's no retention involved since it would be your first gig ever. It's a perfectly well designed process for Tech companies, but it's awful for us I agree.
1 comments
rafiki6 2694 days ago
As much as I love a good conspiracy theory, and yours is pretty damn good because this industry has colluded to keep wages down, I'm hard pressed to believe that this is the case. Interviewing is hard. Startups are led to believe they need to have a higher rate of false negatives over false positives to ensure they don't get a "bad hire". Most people in this industry just follow the trend they see. It's all they know. They have never seen another successful hiring strategy. So it persists.
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soft_shortcut 2693 days ago
My theory was pure imagination :) I 100% agree with what you said. The primary goal is to raise the bar of entry. The problem is, current SWE evaluations focus too much on one single task. The ration "writing functions" versus the rest might be about 20% vs 80%. We focus too much on the 20%. How about team work, collaboration, knowledge transfer, project related issues, mentoring people, setting up environments, understanding users, collaborating with product managers and designers, etc.

If you think about it, it's a pretty risky process for companies. Judging a candidate based on a few 45-min whiteboard exercises and a high level system design question, we're looking at only 20% of the whole picture.

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