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.

The interviews are wrong. Check with your favorite frontier LLM. There has been a lot of research on what's predictive for job performance and what's not, but it's largely ignored.

An easy example: Google's "Project Aristotle" - https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/

tl;dr: psychological safety was the determining factor of highly effective teams. Then Google goes and does large-scale layoffs. Think about your workplace, do you feel safe? Do you think these interviews help people feel safe?