[marssaxman]

My perspective aligns with your newer opinion. I have never studied for an interview, and cannot clearly imagine what such a process would involve; neither have I ever taken a CS course. A coding interview therefore feels like an opportunity to demonstrate my approach to problem-solving using the skills I have acquired over the years, which feels like a reasonable thing to ask of a potential future coworker.

My pet theory, after listening to people gripe about coding interviews for many years now, is that people who have gone into the workforce from a university CS program frequently mistake job interviews for classroom tests, imagining that the goal is to produce a correct answer, and that is why they believe they must study and memorize.

That is certainly not what I expect when I am interviewing someone! I want to see you work and I want to hear you communicate, so I can judge what it might be like to collaborate with you. If I can see that you are capable of breaking down a problem and digging in, asking sensible questions, and making progress toward a reasonable solution, I don't care that much whether you actually arrive there.

[crooked-v]

For FAANG and FAANG cargo cultists, the goal absolutely is to provide a correct answer, and to do it while pretending you're reasoning it out from scratch rather than recognizing the pattern from the hundreds of leetcode practice questions you've drilled on.

[marssaxman]

Naturally I can tell you only what my own expectations are as an interviewer, and I can only guess what other people might expect; but something I can share as a fact is that simply doing the work presented to me, using the skills acquired naturally through the course of my career, with no pretending or practice questions or memorization involved, got me a job at two of those tech giants.

That was many years ago; perhaps things have changed. All I know is that the picture of tech interviewing I see so commonly complained about does not match my experience.