[jan_Inkepa]

Who said I did? I don't particularly; I'm self-employed and have been for a long time.

When I see people getting all het up over technical interviews on various moral grounds, one notes that they often forgo reflecting over the possibility that any replacements could be even more bullshit/arbitrary/exclusionary.

[bmitc]

I inferred it but you said:

> but I know I can get a bit of normie cred by brushing up my algorithms at least...

So I guess the question would be “why do you want normie cred?”, and then the rest of my comment remains the same.

[jan_Inkepa]

Yeah ok, makes sense. (Apologies for making you spell out the question again; I could've probably inferred what you meant and answered that in my earlier reply).

I have a history of self-employment and little formal education in programming per se. It might put potential employers at ease to be able to exhibit some conventional chops, and that kind of interview segment would give me an opportunity to. And algorithm-questions being more or less role-agnostic might mean less preparation rather than more for interviews when one is doing a bunch. OTOH if you want a particular role you should probably better brush up on what's needed for that role and show each application you make some individual love rather than hoping that you can carpet bomb tech company interviews in your city with algorithm-knowhow-powered interviews and get a job out of it.

Given how theoretical this discussion is for me, I feel like I'm slipping into being some kind of devil's advocate role now. I would like to apologise to anyone (basically everyone else here will have more experience with tech interviews than I have) who's reading this rolling their eyes.

[bmitc]

No worries. I was basically just using your comment as a jumping point to say what I wanted to say anyway, as one does. Haha.

My experience has been rough and painful at times, because I tend to be very pragmatically and interest driven in terms of what I learn, outside of being pragmatic about what might be asked in interviews. I also do not have a computer science degree, as I studied mathematics, but I self-study on interests of mine and take interviews as they come. This has made interviews rough at moments, but it's worked out so far, because I would likely be very unhappy at a place that quizzes me on something I could learn over a weekend or two if needed and grades me solely on that. I had one particular interview that wasted an hour and a half on tree questions, then a few more hours on random discussion topics and behavioral questions, and they never once asked me about prior work or side projects. It was a complete waste of time and energy, for both of us, and I have held that interview experience as a prime example of what I have read about Silicon Valley and FAANG-style interviews.