I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

I share both of your concerns (while I was very lucky in getting initial experience, I know of other beginners that haven't/arent, so I'm very sympathetic.) . Started coding for work in '95.

> was I wrong then? Or am I wrong now? Perhaps both.

Neither, I think. The Algorithm interviews are bad for 90% of the positions out there, and experience matters much more than trivia, so you were right then.

And today, everyone is trying to hire "senior" (and above), so there's no concept of "will learn, lacks experience" - and the algorthm questions do badly at identify THAT, so you're right today too.

It turns out that interviewing is hard, and we don't know what works well. Most of us think "we" are the ones that can obviously see what's wrong and everyone else is interviewing poorly. Most of us are wrong.

But even besides that, we need to focus more on getting newer coders that DON'T have experience. We'll spend years looking for people that have experience...longer than it would take to grow that experience. We want seniors because we want people that will grow without being mentored, because we have far more work than people...but we skip one of the ways to reduce that workload.

I'd much rather have an interview that was teaching something new, and see how the person processed it. That's not a good interview either, but at least it is trying accomplish the correct goal.

And when we do interview for senior and above, experience will count a lot more than building a frickin' linked list.

If I were giving a technical interview, after asking some basic fizzbuzz style questions, I would just ask a candidate to bring a personal laptop and "do something cool", i.e. show me what you're good at that is also valuable or useful. Could be spinning up a website, could be some cool parallelized data science or processing job, could be setting up a simple REST server infrastructure, as long as it's done de novo. Has anybody ever been an interviewer or candidate with this kind of interview?

> Companies don’t hire people based on the knowledge they were born with.

Yes, this, so much.

> Don’t get discouraged. There were multiple interviews I had where I didn’t know the solution and interviewers had to shepherd me towards a solution. I still got offers from everywhere I interviewed.

And this, so much, particularly for those with imposter syndrome. You miss all the shots you don't take. If you're unhappy, and have done your best to find a way to happiness in your present role, start looking. Don't keep telling yourself "in another year I'll be ready" or "once I learn X and Y".

I say the following having worked at multiple "big-5" including G.

Do you not feel any of the twist in your stomach that I feel when reading your post? That we're discarding any vestige of track record and accomplishment (that I pragmatically see as having correlated better than any other variable with effective coworkers in the past) for a readily gamable trivia question that I take some perverse pride in not having wasted time studying over the last decade? (Personally, I've spent my time doing far more actionable and applicable things such as running large distributed systems and learning how to do so more effectively while developing better patterns in that scope)

To be clear, this is not some defense of bias. This is a statement that your stated approach seems to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If I think to myself of what this interview process incentivises, it's not behavior that would lead me to be the engineer I am today, nor the behavior that I would chose in a coworker.

I'm just curious as to if there's any amount of dissonance inside G any more as to whether this is an effective way to get the people they want. Maybe it is, per their constant trumpeting of data driven hiring, and that's probably a great signal of why I didn't really feel at home there.

As I see it, the difficult algorithm interviews screen for people who are motivated enough to spend 100s of hours studying for an interview, or know this stuff for some other uncommon reason. Both types are acceptable hires.