The technical interview is an ego trip

I don't know what the interviewers expect, but, generally, your "reward" for admitting you've seen the problem before is a harder question to answer. It seems more in the candidate's interest to pretend to work out the solution than to be honest.

Yeah, I've been asked a lot of leetcode questions and always pause for a couple minutes before the answer hits me in a "brilliant" stroke of insight. This con works really well.

A variant:

A blog post titled "The Technical Interview Is an Ego Trip" was submitted to tech forum Hacker News.

Here are the top-rated comments on that submission:

Here are some more unedited, longer outputs:

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"This is a very accurate and useful description of the process of interviewing at most companies. I have seen this for over a decade. The interview is almost always a complete failure from the point of view of the interviewer. They start out with a very simple question, which they then follow up with a more complex version of the same question, but slightly different. The candidate is supposed to realize that this is a follow-up, and answer it correctly. The interviewer may take notes. The interviewer is supposed to realize that the candidate is able to recognize the pattern, and answer correctly. So the candidate is asked a number of questions, and at the end of them, the interviewer feels that they have learned whether the candidate is smart enough to be hired. This is obviously a very flawed process, because it's very easy to fool the interviewer. If you study the candidate's manner, you can tell if they are intimidated and trying to please you, or if they are confident and trying to impress you. Or if they are just bored, and hoping you will end the interview. It's very easy to fake the answers to questions, too. Most people don't know the answers to the questions they are asked in interviews. They could look up the answers on Wikipedia, but they don't. They just make something up and go with it. It's not like the interview is going to check. It's not like the interview is going to test the candidate's knowledge on the spot."

"All of these comments are eerily familiar because they echo my own experience. I've interviewed hundreds of candidates over the past ten years. I've sat on hiring committees for some of the most in-demand tech jobs. I've hired some amazing people and I've hired some terrible people.

As a general rule, both the good and the bad candidates have the same attitude.

What I'm talking about is the attitude that a candidate comes into an interview with. You can't see it, but I can. It's the attitude that a candidate projects over email, phone, and Slack. It's the attitude that I can tell when a candidate's voice is shaking because they're nervous but they're trying to hide it. That attitude is the one that says "I'm awesome and you should hire me, and if you don't you're a fool."

It's not a coincidence that the candidates that I've come to like or even love the most have been the ones who come in with a humble attitude. These are the candidates that don't care if they get the job because they're happy to have an opportunity to interview. They don't need to prove themselves. They don't need to be the smartest person in the room. They don't need to fight for the job."

"From a former interviewer:

As an interviewer, I'm totally biased towards the candidate. I want to like them and I want to give them the benefit of the doubt when they don't know something. I want to believe that they're a good person. I want to think that if they're not a good culture fit, it's because they're just having a bad day. I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. I don't want them to be bad. I want to think that if they're bad, it's because they're just young and inexperienced and they'll get better.

And as a candidate, you have no idea whether you're being interviewed by one of those people. You never know whether you're talking to the one who's going to be completely honest, or whether you're talking to the one who's going to try to tell you what they think you want to hear."

Ego Trip is the right phrase. A lot of the traditional algorithms puzzler interviews amount to the material being covered in an adversarial, closed-book fashion for the interviewee, after the interviewer has themselves gotten to master the material in a "at your leisure" fashion with an open book.

I wouldn't mind getting asked nasty questions about red-black trees or Krushkal vs Prim or something if I knew the person sitting across from me had taken a "pass this test under these same conditions or you're fired" type scenario. It wouldn't make these interviews a good idea, but it's the reek of hypocrisy about them that puts it over the top for me.

I still contend these interviews - in any form - are a hazing exercise designed to convince you that your own expertise doesn't really matter. You may think of yourself as a accomplished professional developer but to BigCo you are a Smart Person (?) Grade N to be slotted into an arbitrary role. What better way to convey this message than put you through an interview that you would have been best equipped to pass straight out of university or grad school? I suspect my peak "pass the tech interview" would have been straight out of the core courses mid-PhD and my ability to do this has since gone down every year.

I don't think googling is even a valid answer. If he asked "how would you find out how many ridges are on a quarter" then yes (and I think Google it would be everyone's first answer). But counting, as a verb implies the act of measurement, not just obtaining the final number. Assuming that he used that word, it sounds like a trick question.