You're Not Interviewing for the Job. You're Auditioning for the Job Title

And yeah, it's pretty much as bad as you describe.

- at a company where they launched a new division in a satellite office in another city to separate the team from the old guard to create a “tiger team” of experienced developers. I was the second hire. I just spoke to the manager as an experienced professional and we talked about how I solved real world problems

- a new to the company director who needed a lead software engineer to integrate systems of acquisitions that the PE owner was buying.

- the new to the company CTO after the founders found product market fit and wanted to bring technology leadership into the company from a third party consulting company. I was eventually tasked with making everything cloud native, scalable, resilient etc. I was his second technical hire. Our customers were large health care companies where one new contract could bring in 10K new users and even more ETL integrations. He knew I didn’t have any practical AWS experience. He later told me I seemed like a smart guy and I could figure it out.

- AWS itself in the ProServe division - 5 round behavioral interview where I walked through my implementations.

- (2024) third party cloud consulting company in a staff role. They asked how would I architect something and I made sure I hit all of the “pillars” of AWS Well Architected and talked through 12 Factor Apps.

I’m 51 and I stay interview ready. My resume and my career documents are updated quarterly and I keep my network warm.

I believe right now if I were looking for a job, someone would hire me quickly if not for a permanent position, at least I could hustle up on a contract.

- There are low barriers to entry (education is not required, profession licences is not a thing, etc.)

- A strong culture of "job hopping" has emerged, which means companies are continuously interviewing candidates, and candidates are continuously looking for jobs.

- A big willingness to sacrifice the false positives, for the sake of keeping out the false negatives. Basically companies will increase the threshold/bar to keep out the "fakers" and bad hires, even if it means rejecting legitimate hires. The mantra that it is very expensive to hire the wrong people rings throughout the industry, and has for the past decades.

- Candidates are willing to play the game. Some people are willing to grind leetcode questions for months, years, if it means they get a shot at big tech companies. Smaller companies cargo cult.

As a candidate, I feel that I should ask the interviewer if they're seeking a simple solution or a very scalable one. In this way, I can try to tune the response to the specific interviewer's expectations.

- At a large tech company, a referral can help you get an interview; it rarely affects the actual hiring decision or the offer.

- As an interviewee, I might feel like I did great, but I don’t know what signal the interviewer wanted or what their bar is for that level.

My son’s school uses an adaptive test three times per year (MAP Growth). It’s designed so each student answers about 50% of the math questions correctly. Most students walk out with a similar perception of:

- how hard the test was, and

- how well they did.

Those perceptions aren’t strongly related to differences in their actual performance.

Interviews are similar. A good interviewer keeps raising the difficulty and probing until you hit an edge. Strong candidates often leave feeling 50/50. So “I crushed it” (or “that was brutal”) isn’t a reliable predictor of the outcome. What matters are the specific signals they were measuring for that role and level, which may not be obvious from the outside, especially when the exercise is intentionally simple.

Many years ago, when I interviewed at an investment bank for a structuring role, I answered all of their questions correctly, even though some of them were about things I'd never heard of (like a 'swaption'). I answered at what I thought was a reasonable pace, and only for one or two questions did I need a minute or two to work out the answer on paper. At the time, I thought I'd done well. I didn't get the job. I now know more about what they were looking for, and I'd say my performance was somewhere between 'meh' and 'good enough'. I'm sure they had better candidates.

When I interviewed at Google (back in 2014), I was asked the classic https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when question. I didn't know it was a common question, and hadn't specifically prepared for it. Nonetheless, I thought I crushed it. I explained a whole bunch of stuff about DNS, TCP, ARP, subnet masks, HTTP, TLS etc.

I said nothing about equally important things that were much less familiar to me: e.g. keyboard interrupts, parsing, rendering, ...

Luckily I passed that interview, but at the time I thought I'd covered everything important, when in reality my answer helped show the interviewer exactly where the gaps were in my understanding.

If you're going to do coding interviews, you can say "I would use X tool", but you can't _just_ say that, you also have to say "but if I can't, I would write X algorithm, should I write it?"

Also, based on your description, you're suggesting going from entirely client-side, to having a server round-trip, to make it more performant. I could be misunderstanding the full question and context though.

And (granting, for the moment, your premise that everyone worth hiring used the LLMs) how do you know what they do with the code after they take it from the chat window? My limited experience with the code from LLMs is that there's only so much massaging it's worth giving it through the chat interface, and then you need to just take it and edit it by hand.

The alternative is to try to keep up the pretense and I'm terrible at that, so I end up sandbagging the interview and then they of course don't make an offer. And no matter how many times I look at it, I can't decide which is less likely to cause me problems in the long term.

I don't think it was money that caused this, but that many beloved tech giants were intentional built as fraternities by college dropouts and recent college graduates, many of whom did not themselves join a fraternity in college but got soaked in a lot of the atmosphere of them. It's most obvious in the case of Facebook, as publicly documented in things like the movie The Social Network, but it's a foundational DNA strand in Microsoft and Google and nearly any other big tech company that still prefers to call its headquarters/office park a "campus". (It's kind of a through line in the HBO show Silicon Valley too, how much tech companies intentionally copy the "pizza and beer and all-nighters and weird dorm room living" college vibe.)

(The presumption that most of these company executives never were themselves directly involved in college fraternities is that fact that they allow/encourage/build hazing rituals. Fraternities have had somewhat strict anti-hazing education requirements since the 1990s and most Universities have also had strict No Hazing Policies since around then. Since 2024, that education and policy enforcement has spread outside the Greek System to all students at most major Universities that get federal funding directly or indirectly, but before that it is certainly easy to understand how many might have missed the messages and education if they only saw fraternities from the outside.)

There are lots of good engineers who don't encounter this, but who will understand the CAP theorem to the same level you and most other people you consider "good engineers" do, after simply reading the top of the Wikipedia article about it. Ultimately you need to be the kind of person who can understand such a thing to be a good engineer, not someone who knows any particular random thing. On the other hand I would like to know that the candidate knows the CAP theorem if we are working on a distributed database or massive web service. In that case it is actually relevant.

>Every few weeks, someone posts an article about how broken tech interviews are, and the articles always follow the same formula: but I’m really good at REAL engineering… it’s the INTERVIEWS that are wrong!

Interviewing is mostly a different skillset from day to day work. That is why everyone complains about it. Knowing that you are good at the job you're applying for, perhaps better than the smug interviewer, yet blocked because you can't produce an optimal solution to their puzzle (that they probably stole from someone else and/or could not solve themselves in an interview), is hella frustrating. If you urgently need a job, it is even worse.

Eh, no it doesn't? I guess it's one of those questions - what makes a good software engineer - that people will never universally agree on like many other topics in the field but still think their own truth is universal.

An easy example: Google's "Project Aristotle" - https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/

tl;dr: psychological safety was the determining factor of highly effective teams. Then Google goes and does large-scale layoffs. Think about your workplace, do you feel safe? Do you think these interviews help people feel safe?

Fundamentally, you can’t really figure out the things you are interested that way. This is the underlying problem with tech and CS bros which results in the broken system being even more broken.

If anything these types of interviews are really only to validate the interviewers bias which is that they think they are smarter than everyone else and anyone else that came before them. Otherwise why would they have been entrusted to being the gatekeeper of shiny job and privilege to work along the interviewer.

One may as well just defer to SAT scores, GPA, or the fact that a person actually graduated from a reputable CS program, or dare we say, the fact that a person actually had the same or similar jobs successfully over many years.

The reason people bomb these are precisely because they don’t need to exercise that “deep knowledge” that often in the first place. It doesn’t mean they aren’t capable it just means they’ll need to walk thru it longer than possible in a contrived situation. And the fact that they haven’t needed it is telling —these jobs aren’t really hitting the edge of CS research; it’s just a CRUD app.

The autists need to get off their high ponies and look at every other professional industry out there. Those industries have smart people too. Somehow humanity survives and the industry evolves…go figure.

You can have the same result asking for a chess.com score. Anyone with score lower than 1400 is a bad engineer. I'm sure you'll have even better results than asking some CS theorems.