The time spent on practising white board test may not be worthy

You practice whiteboard tests to get a job and not to be a better programmer. If it gets you a better paid job it's a win but then you can stop.

Is this really news to any of us? I figured most people here understood that algorithm/whiteboard test prep was pretty much standard, but incredibly pointless.

>You just need to call std::sort, and don’t care it is “bubble sort” or “quick sort” under the hood

This is often the case, but not always. When you know things about the input data you may be able to get better performance than the generic sorts built into a language. Or, when you know more about sorting algorithms you may be better able to choose among the available sorts/sort options provided by a language or library.

I don't understand the attitude of people willfully choosing not to understand their craft better. Yes we can all be mediocre by just using libraries that other people made, but

1. Someone has to make the libraries 2. The average quality of software is not very good, its very often slow (which is astounding given how fast the hardware is) and buggy, often with disastrous consequences, so we should all be striving to do better than average.

I recently joined Blind and mostly follow the compensation discussions. 2 Takeaways:

1) Most of us are incredibly underpaid

2) A common question is when asking how candidates prepared that resulted in offers is "How many problems did you do on leetcode?" I'd never heard of leetcode but it seems if you want an offer from FANG, Uber, Lyft, etc then you put your time in practicing programming problems.

Seems like the more employers complain about the lack of available labor, the more they ratchet up the pointless interview hazing. It's hard to take their claims of 'no one is available' when they're so capricious in tossing away potential employees.