[yizhang7210]

I think most people would agree that this is indeed the intention of white board interviews.

Unfortunately this has not been my recent interviewing experiences with any of the big tech companies.

I had 4 "on-site" days with big techs and an order of magnitude more "tech screening"s with big techs and unicorns over the past year. Vast majority of them are questions straight from leetcode. And interviewers pretty much expect you to flawlessly write up the correct answer without much discussion.

There's one particular example at one particular company where they asked me to implement "3 sum closest" (https://leetcode.com/problems/3sum-closest/description/), which I didn't know by heart. So I started with the plain 3 sum question.

Instead of discussing how this can be modified to satisfy a more general requirement and/or give me hints to see how I can take feedback, the interviewer simply said: well that's a different question, isn't it. And failed me right then.

So from my personal experience, these interviews have indeed largely become a memorization exercise + some luck that they ask you a question you have seen/memorized before.

[chillacy]

I've come to agree. The fact that there are candidates that study with questions that are leaked online means that the bar ends up getting raised every year. 5 years ago the 2 pointer solution to linked list cycle detection might have been a clever thing, now if you haven't seen it then you're behind.

The good news is that you have a very material advantage if you, say, memorize the top 100 questions on leetcode. The bad news is that real life is just playing out Goodhart's Law:

> "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

[908B64B197]

That interview measures nothing.

The interviewer should have explained what he wanted and meant by the "3 sum closest". Especially with ESL candidates, I can't expect them to have the same names for some common problems.

The best interviews, however, typically starts with a problem the candidate has never seen. Because I consider that asking relevant questions to figure out a problem is an important skill.