Tech Interviews are Changing. Not for the Better

There’s a meme. For perfect clarity, you can see it at the top of this article. 

It’s about interviewers getting problems from Stack Overflow, while candidates do the same.

It’s great that things are changing, and this is no longer the case. However, it seems to me that it isn’t turning into something better.

Here’s what is happening, and what software developers can do about this.

The Problem

The problem indicated by the meme isn’t subtle. It’s the fact that most tech companies have a set of standard problems and questions they cycle through during interviews.

That means problems are featured on HackerRank and GeeksforGeeks, and quiz questions are posted on Glassdoor and the like.

Unsurprisingly candidates take the approach that they can memorize solutions, defeating the idea that companies can assess problem-solving.

We reward candidates for their memory or (even) skill in looking up answers using Stack Overflow and the Internet. This simply can’t be a good way of finding successful developers.

The Extreme Situation

At one interview I got the famous 25 horses problem, cribbed from Google. In my prep for the interview, I’d actually solved this puzzle and memorized the solution.

I would say I was rather naive, so I told them I knew how to solve the problem.

I still haven’t recovered from their response:

“We just want to see how you think.”

They then proceeded with the interview. I proceeded by retrieving the answer from my memory and they really liked it.

I told the interviewers that I knew how to solve the problem from my prep. They said it didn’t matter as they wanted to ‘see how you think’.

Of course, I retrieved the answers from my medium-term memory and got the answer ‘correct’. I have no idea how that relates to ‘see how you think’. The situation was absurd.

Further Absurdities

Consider the experience from my own career (anonymized, of course). I once faced a tech interview where I was asked to implement a heap from scratch. Midway through the process, it became clear the interviewers had no intention of providing any hints or feedback. We sat in awkward silence for 15 minutes. 

Instead of ending the session early, I was left to feel like a deer in headlights. It wasn’t about assessing my problem-solving skills but rather my ability to perform under stress. 

Spoiler: I didn’t get the job.

Not a Problem Anymore

Who uses Stack Overflow now? We have AI to solve all of our problems!

I’m only joking (partly) because of course AI kind of takes the existing solutions as training data and regurgitates them. 

Yet I’d still take the meme and make the simple change of replacing “stackoverflow” with “generative AI”

What Devs Can Do

If you’ve been following this blog for any time you’ll be aware that I think that the software developer interview process requires changing.

Yet as developers we seldom have the political power to change the interview process in any given company. So, what can we actually do?

This presupposes that developers are part of the interview process, and this is often the case 

Ask Questions You Know the Answers to

I’ve been in many interviews where the interviewer reads the question from a list of possible questions. The candidate gives an answer and it’s deemed to be ‘wrong’ since it does not match the one given.

We can stop this. Before interviewing candidates become familiar with the questions and have a go at answering them yourself. This would also be great interview practice for you and shouldn’t take too long.

This will make you much more professional in the interview process. You’ll know the stuff and come across as confident.

Read the Resume

I’ve been in a few interviews where the interviewer hasn’t read my resume. Actually, I need to be more realistic about this, it’s actually pretty much every interviewer hasn’t read my resume.

You see, I’ve loads of evidence about being awesome in there from a previous career. I don’t feel able to mention it because it might be perceived negatively, but if anyone would like to have evidence of communication skills it’s there to see.

I mentioned my experience in my last interview, and they looked rather blank. I said, “it’s on the resume”! I didn’t get the job.

Conclusion

Tech interviewers should be holistic, fair and reflective of real jobs.

That might be something we are not able to change as software developers, so until then can we do a better job for the interviews we take part in? Is that too much to ask?