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I have to conduct these interviews and it kills me inside every time. I hated it as a candidate, but a year or two ago when I interviewed the questions were a

I have to conduct these interviews and it kills me inside every time. I hated it as a candidate, but a year or two ago when I interviewed the questions were a bit easier and expectations were slightly lower. Now with the rise of Top Coder, Leetcode, etc. many candidates have practiced problems to death and can recite almost entirely from memory complex problems. The bar is raising all the time as a result. It's not enough to convey the idea on a whiteboard with reasonable code, maybe a semicolon missing. Now we're more or less expecting 100% compilable code, passing suites of test cases, and sometimes even multiple problems solved in 45 minutes. It's tailor made for coding competition contestants and crammers. And then they get on interview loops and hiring committees I'm dreading my next job search.

FLUX-YOU 9y ago
>The bar is raising all the time as a result. I don't get why it would be that way. Your work's complexity isn't moving as fast as Top Coder, Leetcode, etc., so why is the interview's difficulty pinned to the difficulty on those websites? If you guys are taking on new practices and doing more difficult things, then that makes more sense.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  The problem is simply filtering, it sounds like. It's like grade inflation: the better grades all around don't necessarily indicate smarter students overall, but now you have to select them at a higher bar.
  - FLUX-YOU 9y ago
    >now you have to select them at a higher bar. I don't follow. If you have an interview that reflects the daily work and challenges of your business, having a large pool of candidates able to do that work is a good thing. The only reason to peg your difficulty to some independent institution is to offload the trouble of making that technical interview. Your business isn't weird or failing if it doesn't have some percentage of candidates failing the interview.
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      You assume that the test is directly correlated with aptitude and it simply isn't true. Finding the best candidate for the job is really just a matter of filtering out the best you can hire, all the activities in the interview are designed to filter. If people start gaming the system (e.g. By practicing interview questions) that doesn't make them more apt, it simply makes interviewing (and hence filtering) much harder.

FLUX-YOU 9y ago

>The bar is raising all the time as a result. I don't get why it would be that way. Your work's complexity isn't moving as fast as Top Coder, Leetcode, etc., so why is the interview's difficulty pinned to the difficulty on those websites? If you guys are taking on new practices and doing more difficult things, then that makes more sense.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago
The problem is simply filtering, it sounds like. It's like grade inflation: the better grades all around don't necessarily indicate smarter students overall, but now you have to select them at a higher bar.
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago
  >now you have to select them at a higher bar. I don't follow. If you have an interview that reflects the daily work and challenges of your business, having a large pool of candidates able to do that work is a good thing. The only reason to peg your difficulty to some independent institution is to offload the trouble of making that technical interview. Your business isn't weird or failing if it doesn't have some percentage of candidates failing the interview.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    You assume that the test is directly correlated with aptitude and it simply isn't true. Finding the best candidate for the job is really just a matter of filtering out the best you can hire, all the activities in the interview are designed to filter. If people start gaming the system (e.g. By practicing interview questions) that doesn't make them more apt, it simply makes interviewing (and hence filtering) much harder.