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by ugh123 1932 days ago
Yes, it is generally a good thing to be able to communicate while you're working on a problem within a group.

But rarely does someone get posed a difficult technical design question on the job and on the spot where they've had little or no opportunity to think about it ahead of time. Usually there is a ton of contextual knowledge leading up to those group discussions vs. being asked a question in an interview and then be expected to perform at that same level.
2 comments
eagsalazar2 1932 days ago
Or where the stakes are so high, resulting in this level of terror and paralysis in such a high percentage of candidates. I get the goal and why it is appealing, but in the end these tactics are not useful and are inhumane.
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jedberg 1932 days ago
It depends on the role. I've always worked in sysadmin/devops, so a lot of programming is under duress of an outage. Even for the "regular engineers", I need to know that they can fix a production bug in real time, or at least figure out what to roll back.

And even for the non-duress situation, there are plenty of situations during normal work where a senior engineer will have to jump in and contribute to a problem they've never seen before.

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