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by mam2 2045 days ago
you clearly have no ideas how much algorithms, especially dumb ones, are powerful to discriminate people who think fast from the other

i though like you before doing interviews

1 comments

Is fast really the goal? Or is it just that most engineers don't want to spend time interviewing so that's what we've optimized for?

Some of the absolute best engineers that I've worked with take their time to wrap their heads completely around a problem before diving in. They aren't slow thinkers, but they aren't people who excel at these kinds of interviews either.

I've been doing interviews for a long time now and I find it more effective to surface strong opinions about things they've worked on -- good and bad.

I'm not hiring into a feature factory -- I don't care about fast cogs. I'm hiring people who care about what they do and giving them an environment to thrive in.

I guess it depends but at the internship level an intern whos gast vs an intern whos slow is like 10x things done dometimes. I work in a math heavy environment tho.. so i can understand your point of view
I see yours also, but we definitely shouldn't be skewing hiring process to interns unless at your company you're mostly hiring interns (I'd think that's uncommon?).