[irrational]

Asking about setting a Queen on a chess board. Unless I’m being hired at a company that programs chess sets, it is a nonsense question. If you want to test someone’s problem solving skills, test them with a problem that actually reflects the real work they will be doing at your company.

[dboreham]

The interview is to test for membership in a cult. There are other places you can be paid to code and design software that doesn't require (or even actively disrequires) being a cult member.

...or at least not a member of that particular cult.

[tantalor]

> N-Queens is a classic backtracking problem that gets asked a lot during interviews.

https://fizzbuzzed.com/top-interview-questions-3/

[siriusfeynman]

Which is exactly the point, it's a leetcode question that tests whether you've memorised a bunch of leetcode interview questions

[wiseowise]

> classic backtracking problem

Literally in the parent post.

[hnbad]

> Backtracking is extremely important in today’s software interviews and almost always comes up in some form.

From TFA. Even the article struggles to explain how this is useful outside similar leetcode questions. Yes, backtracking is sometimes a useful approach for some real-life programming problems but leetcode questions neither test for the ability to recognize backtracking problems nor the general ability to solve them.

[bruce343434]

you're supposed to be able to come up with the solution by yourself