[steev]

It is far from saying that. At best it's more like saying a car mechanic should understand how a car works (e.g., how does an internal combustion engine work) even though most car mechanics spend 80% of their time changing oil, oil filters, and rotating tires. I think it is completely reasonable that a car mechanic should understand how a car works because without that knowledge how do they diagnose what is wrong?

My main issue with this topic is everyone seems to complain at the difficulty and ridiculousness of the process yet proposes no viable alternatives. No one likes the idea of take home projects/coding assignments. People write blog posts complaining that they shouldn't have to do side projects to give themselves a portfolio. So what is left? Just the resume? That doesn't seem fair to people coming out of school or career changers that have no experience - how do we evaluate them? We can't ask them anything related to CS.

[bradleyjg]

Work sample. Do you spend any parts of your days writing syntax clean implementations of complex algorithms on a whiteboard with no access to references? Because no one I know has a job anything like that.

Knowing enough about various algorithms to suggest different ones and their trade-offs in a brainstorming session when presented with a (vague) problem is something that actually happens in some jobs. That part is fine to simulate in an interview if it’s an important part of a particular job.

What most software engineering interviews should have but don’t are sections on fixing bugs and adding features in existing codebases. These are the bread and butter of a lot of jobs. But that doesn’t allow for interviewer dick waiving, so it’s pretty rare.