[zerr]

> Obviously, each company can't blindly trust the interviewing practices of everyone's previous employer.

Yet, they copycat each other on this.

> after you've been programming for 10 years

...as I said, you're not desperate enough, so you become picky how you spend your time.

> Companies aren't going out of their way to make it harder to hire good employees into their own companies.

Lowering the churn rate has a higher priority.

> The problems are designed to test CS skills.

No, these problems are designed to test CP skills. Even Norvig admits it has nothing to do with being a good dev/hire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdmyUZCl75s

> How else would you suggest reorganizing the interviews to test for CS skills?

How Caltech, MIT, Harvard, ETH, etc... test for CS skills? Certainly not with CP riddles - unless you take a CP course, which indeed is a separate [optional] course at some of those universities for interview preps specifically.

[bradleyjg]

Very few companies to need people that have very strong CS skills. CS skills are mostly useful for doing CS. For example designing and analyzing an algorithm that’s more efficient than any other algorithm at sorting integers with an average of 10^40 digits on a three tag Turing machine.

While CP skills also aren’t terrible useful for most companies, they are closer than CS skills. What’s really needed are software engineering skills but unfortunately our most prestigious institutions think it’s beneath them to teach that.