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Comment by omgitspavel | Hacker News Reader

A decade+ is plenty of time to spend a few weeks brushing up on CS basics. There is really only a handful of algorithms and data sctructues and none of them are rocket science.

And what's the alternative? Quizzing people on some random C# framework methods? The "I don't use algos in a day to day job" argument has been around forever, but nobody making it ever proposes a better filter.

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The better filter is to spend the precious interview time talking about actual experience solving real work problems, it has a high signal to noise ratio, because it gives you information on many independent axes.

I guess for candidates fresh out of school, you have to fall back to things they should know out of school as a proxy.

Strong no hire for Staff+ signal from this post.

Meta's leetcode gambit includes leetcode Hards and Mediums which aren't just "remember your hash maps and trees!" They're incredibly hard to brute force under time pressure if you haven't practiced similar problems before. Now do that for every interview -- exhausting.

Alternative? Lol? System design. "Walk me through systems you've built." Have a conversation. If you can't then maybe you don't have the skill for interviewing or dare I say the skill to be an engineer.

But there is a system design interview, for staff+ there should be even two system design rounds if I remember correctly.

When I interviewed at faang I was only once asked a leetcode hard question. Mediums in 99% of cases are manageable with just "remembering your hash maps and trees".

I'm in no way saying there aren't people who ask hard questions, but most of the times it is not the case. Also, how would you check that the person can code and solve problems with only checking their past system design experience?

Meta's interview process does include leetcode Hard and Medium problems (although the Hards tend to be on the easier side), but you don't actually have to write working code, just talk your way through an algorithm. I actually was surprised at how it didn't feel like I was being asked to brute force my way through a tough algorithm problem, but more felt like a whiteboarding session with my interviewer. YMMV but I found Meta's interview process to be the most humane "big tech" interview I went through.

> Alternative? Lol? System design. "Walk me through systems you've built." Have a conversation. If you can't then maybe you don't have the skill for interviewing or dare I say the skill to be an engineer.

This. I can talk about projects I've worked on from day 1 in my career to date. Some more than others, but at least I can cover the high level.

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