[zelon88]

> Moving away from this can also put people at a disadvantage because it makes it harder to know how to prepare for interviews.

This just proves that you can memorize a cheat sheet. What good is having interviews if they are so predictable that the applicant basically just repeats himself over and over again? That isn't an interview. That is gatekeeping. "Do you know the secret handshake?"

I don't know the entire multiplication table by heart, but I know how to multiply. But that's not what interviewers are testing for. They basically want to see you rattle off a chart from memory as though that's a non-arbitrary universal indicator of capability.

[ertian]

A skilled interviewer can take the classic CS interview questions and combine them or take them in unexpected directions. Memorizing the solutions won't help with that, and it'll quickly become clear if your understanding is shallow.

Of course, that doesn't really change the fact that the content of the questions has little to do with the work you'll end up doing. But I've done brainstorming with coworkers, and none of us had any ideas for interview approaches that would work better--except maybe those 2-day take-home projects that everybody hates. I think I remember a paper claiming that random acceptance would work about as well as the current interview process.

[Apocryphon]

> A skilled interviewer can take the classic CS interview questions and combine them or take them in unexpected directions.

Problem is, the percentage of skilled interviewers is likely not much higher than the percentage of skilled candidates.