| 100%. I agree with everything you said. The interview is supposed to be about whether someone can master new stuff. I've heard good interviews described as "being smart together". Drilling on questions flies in the face of that. Here's the problem. It's really hard to get companies to change. A bit of a long-winded answer that I hope will come back around... I don't feel great about my role in perpetuating the interview prep industrial complex. It wasn’t my intention – to this day, interviewing.io is first and foremost a hiring company that’s trying to make eng hiring efficient and fair (though bc of the downturn we've been doing less hiring than we'd like). Our goal is to find the best performers, regardless of who they are and how they look on paper, and get them into any company they want. So why do we do mock interviews? Mock interviews were supposed to be a way to attract people to our platform, not an end in itself. Over time, though, mock interviews have become a larger and larger part of our business, and that’s part of the reason I wanted to write this book. I'm hopeful that changing the conversation around prep and empowering engineers to learn the material rather than memorize the material will make a dent in an industry that is, as of now, headed in the wrong direction. The other thing we’re doing at interviewing.io is gathering a massive interview data set. Unlike other mock interview platforms, we don’t tell our interviewers what questions to ask or how to interview. Instead, we let each interviewer run their own process. This means that we end up with a lot of “interview biodiversity” on our platform. I'm hopeful that, over time, we’ll be able to use that data to do a retroactive analysis where we look at users’ outcomes and which mock interviews they passed and failed to figure out which types of interviews carry the most signal and, over time, conclusively come up with some best practices around the best way to surface good engineers. Because it can’t be what our industry is doing now! The other piece of the puzzle is having enough mindshare, when we do figure out the answers, to have people listen. We've already blogged a LOT about what companies can do to hire better. Here's our collection of posts specifically for employers and how they can hire better: https://interviewing.io/blog/category/for-employers-how-to-h... The reality is that employers don't care. They won't change their behavior unless you're somehow making things 10X cheaper or faster. So that's what we want to do, both with respect to how companies hire (making it be about what people can do instead of the brands on their resumes) and with respect to how companies interview (hopefully moving away from toy algorithmic problems that people can drill on and memorize). |