Constantly confused by this, so much arguing back and forth, and yet the single easiest way to deal with this is a stripped down real world problem and then giv

Constantly confused by this, so much arguing back and forth, and yet the single easiest way to deal with this is a stripped down real world problem and then giving it to a whole bunch of different candidates. Some people adopt this some people don't some people argue that it's meaningless, and go back to the standard silly interview patterns of algorithm questions and meaningless complex fizzbuzz alternatives. tptacek summarized this in his hiring post: http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ My personal conclusion is that most companies don't want this for two reasons: 1. culture fit is more important for people in a rigid hierarchical structure, partly because an out of the box thinker could be dangerous for that structure. too much questioning authority, too much pointing out flaws. It's much easier to have a good worker bee than wondering why you need 40 employees to build an automated gif platform. 2. in most companies everyone is very reluctant to make decisions. for example management struggles with clear direction because it opens them up to the question of liability. if they make a decision and it's wrong they might get fired. HR works the same way, if HR passes a resume along they want it to hit a list of keywords, so they can cover their asses if he turns out to be a bad hire. Basically everyone is so scared to make a mistake that they make a lot more mistakes trying to avoid them. The opening of the cracking the coding interview she talks about how they don't really care about false positives and negatives, they just want those to stay below a certain threshold. But consider the hiring scale of google compared to a small company and suddenly those things matter. One bad hire can be toxic. And basing your hiring strategy on something a huge behemoth with infinite money does is kind of silly imho