Becoming a dungeon master for an interview

Could you just have them sign an NDA and pair with people on some non-trade-secret real issue that needs addressing?

If you start by giving a little bit of context and then jump into some reasonable end of the backlog, then you get to see how they think of priorities, they get to ask you lots of contextual questions, you get negotiate with each other a thing to do, you get to investigate and/or develop a solution, and at the end of it all parties involved got lots of signal about what it’s like and what’s required to do the job. Not to mention you stand the chance of some normally useful thing getting further along too. Work with the person like they’re “consultant for a day” and see where you get to.

Why is our industry so resolute to come up with a bunch of bespoke, oblique representations of a job when the actual job is right there available to be used for assessment?

> When interviewing as a software engineer, for example, you’ll run into places that lean heavily on algorithms interviews. And don’t get me wrong, those interviews can be fun (in the same way that Project Euler can be fun), but it’s not very relevant for most jobs

I'm curious what changed around 2015-2016 that led to the current interview process. In the before times the interview was more of a technical conversation, sure they had some gotcha questions, but nothing too brutal. If you had real experience that you could talk about, maybe it was validated against references or a background check. People usually looked for a CS or adjacent degree, and that was enough. The quality of folks wasn't too different in my experience.

I really feel for those with a lot of experience that are being dropped into the fire, especially those with families who may not have the time to memorize patterns for 3 months, but are still very capable. Non-tech, low paying jobs now ask you to create a soduko solver or trap rain water within 45 minutes. There's not many places to go for those that don't 'adapt'.

> The daycare center aesthetic and all this weird pronoun crap achieves the same ends. If everyone around you is an androgynous alien speaking a novel language and communications mishaps will get you fired, you won't feel comfortable working there.

I'd argue that if you can remember people's names, you can remember their preferred pronouns - and that if you can't, or refuse to because you think it's "weird crap", they won't feel comfortable with you working there either.

> I'm curious what changed around 2015-2016 that led to the current interview process. In the before times the interview was more of a technical conversation, sure they had some gotcha questions, but nothing too brutal. If you had real experience that you co...

Places just copied big tech companies that were already doing that for many years prior to 2015. I had leetcode style interviews well before 2010 even.

My favorite interview experience was a short take-home that required me to write a toy version of something the company actually did on a day-to-day basis, followed by an in-person pairing session to extend that toy to handle more functionality and cover certain edge cases.

Of course, the downside is that it required me to spend four hours working on this at home, and then another several hours at the interview - but having to spend time interviewing is something that cannot be avoided, so I'd much rather the time be spent on something relevant that actually shows off my abilities, rather than playing Advent of Code with money at stake, or filling out astrological profiles.