These are not "puzzles". That makes it seem like there is some trick or clever concept the candidate needs to grasp that show "lateral thinking".
There isn't.
These are (or supposed to be) fundamental problems of computer science that require good understanding of algorithms, data structures, code performance, and can be solved in <30 mins on a whiteboard.
Yes, these exist, and there are plenty of them. A pretty common and well known one is "HEAD to TAIL" - where you have a dictionary of 4 letter words, and given an input of 2 words find a connecting path between them changing one letter at a time. This isn't a puzzle. It's a problem to solve and approach from different angles and allowing for a large number of solutions of different performance characteristics
> Not a single person out of several thousand emails and messages came out in defense of the current state of interviewing processes - I’ll let this one stand on its own.
Means absolutely nothing. Most of us are not interested in ruining the day of someone who is unhappy with the hiring process by revealing the truth that most likely it just means the person was not good enough. That seems cruel. I'm kind of going further here though because this is the second time this OP is coming up on the front page of hackernews
The questions are indeed puzzles; that's why Gayle Laakmann and others have made a living publishing books of the questions themselves. And the puzzles are distinctly different from the content in the majority of CSE curricula.
What's more is problematic is that the construction and evaluation of the puzzles is highly subjective and nearly everywhere lacks rigor. Completion time is a key metric while quality of communication is most commonly either ignored or not assessed at all uniformly among interviews.
(Aside: what's frustrating is that companies make candidates sign NDAs for on-sites; these prevent candidates for disclosing or _selling_ the information they might glean in the process, which very rarely happens. In actuality, it's the former interviewers who violate protections for "confidential info" and copyright when they go and monetize their experience post-job, or even on-the-job e.g. Rooftop Slushie).
> Most of us are not interested in ruining the day of someone who is unhappy with the hiring process
That's only true in so far as you, as an employee, are paid to achieve positive sentiment among candidates, no matter how shallow that sentiment may be. That's indeed cruel, and it's well-established that interviewers are widely unaware of the consequences of the current hiring process. That's why we get articles like those from the OP.
A true interest in improving the hiring process includes:
* Making prep materials and courses freely available (helps industry candidates)
* Committing time to CSE outreach to better integrate company needs to CSE (helps new grads)
* Finding questions that reflect real tasks on the job (helps the evaluation have a chance of being predictive)
* Closing the information gap between hiring managers and candidates: disclosure (in aggregate) of hiring rates, salaries, etc.
Playing along and doing hundreds of coding puzzle interviews is a waste of time for all involved.
> quality of communication is most commonly either ignored or not assessed at all uniformly among interviews.
Nothing could be further from the truth at my company
> A true interest in improving the hiring process includes: * Making prep materials and courses freely available (helps industry candidates)
Recruiters share this with candidates. They ignore it.
> * Committing time to CSE outreach to better integrate company needs to CSE (helps new grads)
Go to any university career fair and you'll see companies with booths clarifying these positions working against the mis information of negative blog posts
> * Finding questions that reflect real tasks on the job (helps the evaluation have a chance of being predictive)
They do. You don't have to agree, but they do. The real task on the job is "disambiguate a complex problem autonomously, and come up with a plan to address it." The interview is a 20 minute constrained version of it.
* Closing the information gap between hiring managers and candidates: disclosure (in aggregate) of hiring rates, salaries, etc.
Semi-agreed. I do wish people and companies were more transparent about salaries. But there is already an entitlement complex from a bunch of engineers on this site and many others complaining why some dude at Netflix in California is making 500k, while he is making 80 in Oklahoma writing code for Bank of America.
A lot of people at my company do, but you never hear about this stuff because nobody blogs about a career fair that came with some friendly helpful insights from senior engineers.
Also nobody blogs about recruiters when they are super helpful and give a ton of relevant interview prep material (which ours do), partially because most candidates frankly ignore the material thinking it's not relevant.
These are not "puzzles". That makes it seem like there is some trick or clever concept the candidate needs to grasp that show "lateral thinking".
There isn't.
These are (or supposed to be) fundamental problems of computer science that require good understanding of algorithms, data structures, code performance, and can be solved in <30 mins on a whiteboard.
Yes, these exist, and there are plenty of them. A pretty common and well known one is "HEAD to TAIL" - where you have a dictionary of 4 letter words, and given an input of 2 words find a connecting path between them changing one letter at a time. This isn't a puzzle. It's a problem to solve and approach from different angles and allowing for a large number of solutions of different performance characteristics
> Not a single person out of several thousand emails and messages came out in defense of the current state of interviewing processes - I’ll let this one stand on its own.
Means absolutely nothing. Most of us are not interested in ruining the day of someone who is unhappy with the hiring process by revealing the truth that most likely it just means the person was not good enough. That seems cruel. I'm kind of going further here though because this is the second time this OP is coming up on the front page of hackernews