A small pet peeve of mine is when someone criticizes the interview process without having been on both sides, and assumes that they know what the acceptance cri

A small pet peeve of mine is when someone criticizes the interview process without having been on both sides, and assumes that they know what the acceptance criteria is. This article is a good example of that: > They want to get a sense for what candidates actually know versus what they’ve copy/pasted from the web This is not quite right. It's right in the sense that if your resume says 3 years of JS experience and you're spending 20% of the time fumbling with unmatched brackets, it says something about you. It's right in the sense that if you say you've done React at two previous jobs but proceed to call setState multiple times in series and then scratch your head when stuff doesn't work, that says something about you. Etc. However, it doesn't mean what a lot of newbies seem to think (that when receiving some leetcode-like task, they're supposed to have the exact ideal answer memorized) In my interviews, one of the first things I tell candidates is in fact "feel free to google stuff, I'm not here to test whether you've memorized stuff, I'm more interested in how you approach problems". At least for FAANG/bay area tech, good interviewers looks for signals, and not just purely technical rote memorization: on a basic level, one looks at whether the candidate has working familiarity w/ syntax and APIs that they ought to know, but on deeper levels how they think about code structure, refactoring, testability concerns, design trade-offs, how effectively they communicate (both speaking and listening to feedback), etc. There may also be smaller considerations for legitimate "fit" factor, for example whether a candidate is more startup oriented or more enterprise oriented (this mostly matters when you think about their career aspirations vs what the job is able to provide in terms of challenges). You can get a pretty decent feel for how "senior" a candidate is, and then acceptance becomes more a question of placing the candidate on a sliding scale based on how demanding of a role one is trying to fill. The one criticism I have about the interview process is that many interviewers don't tweak their expectations based on level quite as much as they should, especially if they only hire sparsely for low seniority levels. For a junior hire, there should be an expectation that some ramp up time will be required. Expecting upfront solid experience with a laundry list of technologies from them does a service to no one.