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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

Is this really what technical interviews are like in Silicon Valley? I’ve never seen anything like it in the “real” world.

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more or less. i wasn't asked n queens specifically, but i was asked to move a knight from one square to another. but no, you're not supposed to solve it using the type system itself

Um, which part?

Asking about setting a Queen on a chess board. Unless I’m being hired at a company that programs chess sets, it is a nonsense question. If you want to test someone’s problem solving skills, test them with a problem that actually reflects the real work they will be doing at your company.

> N-Queens is a classic backtracking problem that gets asked a lot during interviews.

https://fizzbuzzed.com/top-interview-questions-3/

Which is exactly the point, it's a leetcode question that tests whether you've memorised a bunch of leetcode interview questions

> classic backtracking problem

Literally in the parent post.

> Backtracking is extremely important in today’s software interviews and almost always comes up in some form.

From TFA. Even the article struggles to explain how this is useful outside similar leetcode questions. Yes, backtracking is sometimes a useful approach for some real-life programming problems but leetcode questions neither test for the ability to recognize backtracking problems nor the general ability to solve them.

you're supposed to be able to come up with the solution by yourself

The interview is to test for membership in a cult. There are other places you can be paid to code and design software that doesn't require (or even actively disrequires) being a cult member.

...or at least not a member of that particular cult.

Only if you want to get hired.

I never engage in such teasing and not getting hired, so you're likely correct.

I’ve been hiring developers for decades at a Fortune 100 company and have never engaged in such nonsense. Unless you are hiring people to program chess sets, the question in the article is foolish. If you want to test their problem solving or coding skills, give them a problem from the actual work they will be doing at your company.

I wish more companies thought that way. It seems like most of them are just cargo culting Google's hiring methods with the expectation that it will turn them into the next Google.

> Unless you are hiring people to program chess sets, the question in the article is foolish.

Ever heard about word “abstraction”?

Sure. But do you know how often I’ve had to do backtracking in 25 years of professional programming? Zero times. Maybe the person is interviewing for a position where this kind of leetcode question is applicable, but in my experience this question is not abstracting real normal day to day problems.

Username isn't accurate - you should be called rational.

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