You're Not Interviewing for the Job. You're Auditioning for the Job Title

Every few weeks, someone posts an article about how broken tech interviews are, and the articles always follow the same formula: but I’m really good at REAL engineering… it’s the INTERVIEWS that are wrong!

It sounds like the author may have faced a bad interviewer, but I’d be curious to see their feedback on the author so we get both sides.

As I comment each time: you’re not being asked to sort a million item array because it represents the job, you’re being asked to sort a million item array because I want to see how you think, how you solve problems, and how good your underlying CS fundamentals are.

Yes - that means regardless of seniority, I expect you to know CAP theorem. Sure, knowing CAP theorem does not imply you are a good engineer, but being a good engineer DOES imply you know CAP theorem.

The job will change from project to project, but the CS skills should carry through.

>Yes - that means regardless of seniority, I expect you to know CAP theorem. Sure, knowing CAP theorem does not imply you are a good engineer, but being a good engineer DOES imply you know CAP theorem.

There are lots of good engineers who don't encounter this, but who will understand the CAP theorem to the same level you and most other people you consider "good engineers" do, after simply reading the top of the Wikipedia article about it. Ultimately you need to be the kind of person who can understand such a thing to be a good engineer, not someone who knows any particular random thing. On the other hand I would like to know that the candidate knows the CAP theorem if we are working on a distributed database or massive web service. In that case it is actually relevant.

>Every few weeks, someone posts an article about how broken tech interviews are, and the articles always follow the same formula: but I’m really good at REAL engineering… it’s the INTERVIEWS that are wrong!

Interviewing is mostly a different skillset from day to day work. That is why everyone complains about it. Knowing that you are good at the job you're applying for, perhaps better than the smug interviewer, yet blocked because you can't produce an optimal solution to their puzzle (that they probably stole from someone else and/or could not solve themselves in an interview), is hella frustrating. If you urgently need a job, it is even worse.