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I've been thinking about it for a while to try to transition from a mechanical engineer to a software engineer but are all the interviews as miserable as HN mak

I've been thinking about it for a while to try to transition from a mechanical engineer to a software engineer but are all the interviews as miserable as HN makes it seem? I feel like these interview structure is a form of deterrent. I had a quick call with one of the recruiters from Apple for a hardware engineer position. He said the interview will take about a week and needs about a month to prepare... I didn't call back because it doesn't even seem reasonable to me. I've interviewed many times (mechanical engineering positions) for big companies (10K employees+) to small (<50 employees) and they're usually a one day remote and one day on-site interview. There would be a couple of technical questions and some technical discussions but nothing like, solve this Navier-Stokes equation for creep flow from your memory. I don't think any competent manager would even ask that to me.

funkymike 10y ago
There is a big difference between computer science as taught and software development in practice. These hiring practices are there to weed out people just can't design applications or write code with any proficiency.
- syntaxing 10y ago
  But can't that be said about every discipline of engineering? I could be wrong but these hiring practices are particularly prevalent in the software roles compared to the other major discipline of engineering. I'm more curious to what is different about software engineering/development roles that require these methods. The amount of applications or size of the company doesn't seem like a logical reason since I've seen equally sized (employee-wise) companies weed out and select specific roles pretty well (relatively).