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I agree with you. If the point of "prep" for an interview is memorizing and reviewing stuff you haven't used in years, and will likely never use while you're e

I agree with you. If the point of "prep" for an interview is memorizing and reviewing stuff you haven't used in years, and will likely never use while you're employed at the place where you are interviewing, then it's largely meaningless. It's just cramming for an exam, instead of meaningfully understanding and using concepts. And don't get me started on "brain teasers," which don't tell you anything at all meaningful about a candidate. Better questions work something like this: what's the most challenging technical problem you had to solve in your last job? Why was it so challenging? What did you have to learn to solve it?

astrofinch 16y ago
Or you could just ask good interview questions that don't require knowledge of computer science trivia, like asking the candidate to write a program that plays hangman. Of course, depending on the application computer science "trivia" could actually be part of the job requirement. E.g. if you're trying to build a scalable web service, maybe it really is important for the candidate to know when to use a heap. I think a more or less unequivocally bad interview question is how to figure out if a linked list ever loops back using constant space. Maybe I'm just extrapolating my own stupidity, but I don't think that's the sort of thing people can reliably be expected to discover for themselves on the fly, so you'll just end up filtering out folks who haven't heard the answer to the question already.