[socratic]

My question is: what has led current hiring practices, and specifically interviews, to be the way they are? I've been doing a job search recently, and to me at least, the process seems almost as arbitrary as management consulting interviews.

The common case is: (a) a (very nice) recruiter who largely doesn't understand your background calls to ask about which part of the company you should work in, then (b) you have a few phone interviews where you are asked what might as well be trick coding questions ("with some fancy bit manipulation this could be O(n)!") that are mostly collected in a few books or online anyway, and then (c) you do an on-site where you get another three to six of these questions, with maybe a simple "system design" question thrown in.

My hypothesis has been that the hiring process is largely aimed at Computer Science undergraduates with no significant prior work experience, and that the best way to distinguish just graduated CS undergrads is by testing them on the hardest class they are likely to have all taken: Introduction to Algorithms. Or maybe interviewing is just rarely rewarded and thus the lowest priority for engineers? In any case, insight into the design and implementation of this process would be really interesting.

[msg]

For me, if you can't do the intro to CS stuff and write simple programs in an interview, that serves as a proxy that you can't do the advanced CS stuff and write complex programs on the job.

There are many many candidates who make it to the phone screen who can't Fizzbuzz. Also it can be difficult to separate out people who actually did significant work on a product on their resume from people who were just "on the team" and didn't contribute effectively.

Time is limited and resumes are full of lies and BS. But you can't BS your way through a program and make it run.