[lhorie]

One needs to be especially careful with adapting experience to interview questions. Unlike the candidate, you probably were already immersed in the problem domain for months or years and have good context in what techniques exist and are relevant to the problem domain.

One mistake some interviewers make is implicitly assuming that candidates can somehow conjure the same level of context from first principles, or that a specific algorithm might be familiar or reusable outside of its original context. Another mistake is "looks-like-me" bias.

For example, I happen to have a lot of context on a very specific algorithm that underlies basically every modern web framework but if I wanted to evaluate a candidate on web performance, I'd look at performance optimization as a open ended problem domain rather than drilling them on the particulars of this specific algorithm. In fact, out in the world of web framework performance, the most novel advancements come not from revisiting the algorithms but from looking at the problem domain from entirely new angles that had not even been considered before.

[xsmasher]

Every time I feel "this would be a good interview question!" it is not. It's usually something juicy that I chewed on for two days. How can I expect a candidate to solve it in 45 minutes?

[eropple]

I've had that same feeling on that side of the table, too. Like some of the stuff I've run into is really cool and really rewarding and is really tempting because it would make an interview something more fun for me. Because I know the answer.

Over time I've learned that I'd kind of rather lean a little more towards the easier side than the harder for writing code during an interview, because the interview is unpredictably stressful. But at the same time, as prioritizing communication and a degree of thoughtfulness has become more important (which has ended up with me bopping over to a devex job where I am now), I've leaned more heavily on "let's talk through XYZ and suss out how you discursively approach the problem" types of interviews. Which definitely selects for a particular audience, but it's one more useful for the roles I've hired for.