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The blacklist can only get so long. There is a bank of questions but they only really get blacklisted if a bunch of candidates show up and they’ve obviously mem

The blacklist can only get so long. There is a bank of questions but they only really get blacklisted if a bunch of candidates show up and they’ve obviously memorized an answer to it. Or if it shows up in a high-profile place. Like, if your question is the first question in a new edition of “Cracking the Coding Interview” it will probably get dropped. I think individual questions that got posted would be blacklisted ten years ago. But nowadays, there are so many people doing interviews and such a large bank of questions (public and otherwise) that the blacklist isn’t so big a deal. Because there are so many vetted questions to ask, you can pick one and not worry to hard candidates may have done drills using that specific question. And if they have, you can have a second question on standby. As an interviewer, I’m happy to see questions posted. You get to see people share their experiences answering it and make the question better, rephrase things to be less ambiguous or misleading, maybe tweak some wording that trips up non-native speakers, or decide that people have a bad experience answering it and you should drop the question. As an interviewer, I also ask questions from the blacklist. I’m not gonna say something arrogant like “I can tell” if you knew the question ahead of time, but my job as interviewer is to get the best information about you that I can to the hiring committee, and balancing that with the goal of giving you a pleasant enough experience during the interview that you want to accept an offer. Trying to catch cheaters is not my top priority. All of this being colored by the facts that the interview process itself is a bit traumatic and people running interviews often don’t run them well.

manfredo 6y ago
The way some companies work is that there's a set list of question archetypes, but interviewers come up with their own methods of presenting the problem. For example, a seam carving problem might get presented as finding a horizon in an image. I would often present the same problem as finding a pass through a mountain range given a height map of the terrain. Also, it's possible for interviewers to detect candidates who study the problem beforehand. A couple questions at Dropbox were spread online for years, and it would become clear which candidates read up on those questions online. Some would propose, without prompting, solutions to older iterations of the interview question.
- klodolph 6y ago
  The last time I did this my experience was a little different. There was a big bank of questions that you could vote on like Reddit, and questions would get marked as “banned” or unmarked. You’re free to ask the questions that you liked, but I found it helpful to use one of the questions from the bank that had a ton of commentary, and then polish it to my own interview style.

manfredo 6y ago

The way some companies work is that there's a set list of question archetypes, but interviewers come up with their own methods of presenting the problem. For example, a seam carving problem might get presented as finding a horizon in an image. I would often present the same problem as finding a pass through a mountain range given a height map of the terrain. Also, it's possible for interviewers to detect candidates who study the problem beforehand. A couple questions at Dropbox were spread online for years, and it would become clear which candidates read up on those questions online. Some would propose, without prompting, solutions to older iterations of the interview question.

klodolph 6y ago
The last time I did this my experience was a little different. There was a big bank of questions that you could vote on like Reddit, and questions would get marked as “banned” or unmarked. You’re free to ask the questions that you liked, but I found it helpful to use one of the questions from the bank that had a ton of commentary, and then polish it to my own interview style.