It's fine to feel whatever you feel about technical interviews, but the guidelines ask us to be more measured when we post comments here. Several guidelines cover this in different ways:
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Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
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IMO "easy/medium" coding questions have their place. I run quite a lot of interviews and I have many many "seniors" from known techn companies that can't do exercises that are glorified reverse for loops.
The idea all tech companies require you to know niche data structures is kind of a meme honestly. I'm sure some do but not the ones I've interviewed at at least.
Sure, if you think the candidate might actually be lacking basic skills, which wasn't obvious from his resume you obviously ask him some basic trivia. But establishing this as part of a process, including having companies which prepare you for this process is ridiculous.
What is the point of all of this. No other industry has this.
Because other engineering disciplines don't have joke applicants, because other engineering disciplines have governing bodies distributing credentials. If you're a PE, everybody knows you have a base level of competency in your field. Yeah you might not be a great engineer but you're not going to be the Civil Engineering equivalent of somebody typing questions into ChatGPT and pretending to not understand you when you ask why they're reading a script back to you.
I'm not necessarily arguing that software engineering should have some gatekeeping organization that you need to prove yourself to, but you take the good with the bad. In other engineering disciplines, a third party organization takes the responsibility of filtering out the unqualified people. In software, the hiring companies have to do it, so you end up with the first interview (at least) being spent just proving you're not lying about every single thing on your resume.
No other engineering discipline has such a low barrier to entry where everyone can self tech themselves at home almost everything people that go through the higher education pipeline can, and then extra on top due to how fast the industry evolves, where even having a degree might not make you qualified for a job today. In no other engineering discipline is all the tooling FOSS.
So the PRO is that anyone can become a SW engineer, but the CON is that when anyone can become a SW engineer you're competing with soo many people on an even playing field that weeding out the wheat from the chaff is tricky and no company had the perfect solution because it doesn't exist.
What other engineering profession things change so fast that tools from ~20 years ago (C, PHP, Perl, etc) are not useful on the job market anymore? What other engineering profession gets hundreds/thousands of applicants per open position? What other engineering profession has such a lack of standardization that every company works completely different, with different tools and different processes to ultimately do the same thing?
In most other traditional engineering disciplines it's not just the university degree or credential that matters to getting in, but a lot of critical knowledge can only be gained from mentoring and learning at the job from graybeards of the industry, knowledge you'll never get if you try to teach yourself, even if technically all the relevant courses and information is freely available online. Not to mention that in a lot of engineering professions the tooling is specialized, non-FOSS and very $$$, so your only chance of touching it is at university or a company who will pay you to get certified in that tooling.
How many 100% self taught, no prior experience people are applying to these positions and are accepted for interviews? Obviously that number is extremely low especially given the last couple of years.
Having a process which only exist for the 1% of least likely candidates is absurd. Even if you wanted to give these people w chance, obviously you don't need to subject the 99% of people to the same process. What is the point of asking a CS graduate with 5 years industry experience some brain teaser questions? There is literally no point, it tells you exactly zero about the candidate.
Also, you can self teach everything in most engineering disciplines. What part of Electrical engineering or mechanical engineering requires a substantial financial investment or has things you could only learn in a university?
How is criticizing the premise of something a "generic tangent"? If the premise behind something is bad the whole thing is bad.
Evaluating something obviously needs to account for the context it exists in. In fact talking about this particular Show HN is impossible without implicitly or explicitly taking a position on the hiring process. If the current hiring practices were good, having resources to succeed in them would be beneficial and praise worthy. Otherwise they only help to strengthen a broken process, although obviously it might be beneficial to individuals to game that process (which further demonstrates the problems with that process).
I don't see how you even could substantively talk about this post without evaluating the hiring practices it presupposes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html