Not that I disagree with all of your points, but I can't say I've seen any evidence that there is such a thing as Standard Developer Interview™. Over the past m

Not that I disagree with all of your points, but I can't say I've seen any evidence that there is such a thing as Standard Developer Interview™. Over the past month, I've been interviewing with 8 different companies, 3 of which are in the game development industry. They have all had substantially different approaches to their recruitment process and interviewing. I've identified some common elements, but each of the companies mixed and matched them in different ways and degrees. The techniques used were: - timed online test (e.g. HackerRank or Codility), reviewed later by the team - online, real-time coding during the phone screen (e.g. HackerRank or CollabEdit) - take-home project with a deadline (usually up to 2 weeks), reviewed later by the team - phone, video-conference or on-site discussion about employment history and experience - phone, video-conference or on-site discussion about technical problems - on-site whiteboard coding - on-site coding on company-provided box - on-site coding on candidate's own box - coffee-shop conversation about behavioral topics The topics for technical discussions were: - algorithms, data structures and complexity (big-O notation, trees, hash tables, lists, circular buffers, breadth-first and depth-first traversal, binary search, recursion) - scalability (caching, load-balancing, sharding) - concurrency (locks, conditional variables, contention, memory fences) - mathematics (vectors and matrices, linear algebra, computational geometry, combinatorics and probability) - low-level concepts (manual memory management, cache locality, specifics of garbage collection, VMTs in C++) - object-oriented design (inheritance, polymorphism, fragile base class, composition over inheritance) - API design (specifying constraints, changing API based on requirement changes, paging results, increasing or decreasing operation granularity) Now, I know that this is just 8 companies. I know that this is a drop in the ocean. I know that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data". But over and over again, I've seen the same claim on HN: our industry focuses too much on computer science "trivia" questions. For an audience that usually requires quality, sourced data to support arguments, we seem to be awfully quick to draw generalized conclusions about this specific topic.