Hi folks, it has been a while since… Still checking some interesting interview questions just for fun and brain teasing.

To be honest asking these questions to candidates and expecting them to solve in a few minutes sounds just wrong 🙂 What’s even more interesting is that they expect candidates to write their answers (actual code) on the paper or -even worse- google docs etc. I feel like this is a test of obeisance. They set the rules,  you have to obey even if they are nonsense. In my opinion it is a subconscious message; its interpretation is ‘I am the boss, do what I say’.

I am really curios about the statistics of employees chosen by these kind of interviews. It has to be correct and just right? Having interviews many times along my career (I’ve been on both sides) I can easily say that as the interview gets technical as the interviewers see theirselves more powerful and even superior.

Have you heard about Stanford prison experiment? I find these arrogant interviews rather similar to this experiment.

Apart from the psychological aspects of these interviews, lets talk about the reality. Say you want to get hired by one of these big bosses (google-amazon-facebook-yahoo etc) you have to memorize few hundred of questions and during the interview pretend (act and lie) that you never heard of the question, try to remember what was the brute-force solution 🙂 sounds funny and sad at the same time.

Does all these questions and struggle make you a great engineer or coder? Does it? What’s the reason – Where is the proof? I’ve been working over 10 years in the field and never ever had to open the cracking the coding interview book to find any help at all (I respect the book, it is great, but it’s the fact). When you face with real challenges you are not expected to write your code on the paper and hand it over to your team lead and s/he scratches on it 🙂 Thanks god it has been a while since the technology developed and we are not coding on Punched Cards any more.

I can hear what you are saying, how could they possibly pick the better candidates? My answer is; not like that. People giving up all the work they are doing -including their software projects- and memorizing 189 questions in weeks if not months??? Do we really want to work with them? Are they really more productive? Just an observation those getting high marks from interviews are tend to be less collaborative.

To conclude check this out and have fun 🙂 http://pythonforengineers.com/the-programming-interview-from-hell/