Flaws in Engineering Interview Practices | Generated by AI
Question: What are some unpopular opinions about interviewing for engineering jobs?
Answer:
Here are some genuinely unpopular (but increasingly common among experienced engineers and hiring managers) opinions about the engineering interview process:
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LeetCode-style algorithmic interviews are mostly theater and correlate poorly with real-world engineering ability.
Grinding medium/hard problems for months selects for test-taking stamina and recent prep, not for people who ship reliable systems. Most companies never need you to invert a binary tree on a whiteboard. -
Take-home projects are usually worse than LeetCode.
They consume 10–40 unpaid hours, favor candidates with free time (no kids, no second job), and are often judged superficially by exhausted reviewers. A 4-hour take-home tells you almost nothing compared to a 1-hour pair-programming session. -
“Culture fit” is responsible for more homogeneity than outright discrimination.
People hire clones of themselves and call it culture fit. The result: teams full of 20-30-something extroverted men from the same handful of universities who all listen to the same podcasts. -
Asking about previous salary or salary expectations early should instantly disqualify the company.
It’s a power play designed to anchor low. Good companies pay market rate for the role, not “what you’re willing to settle for.” -
System-design interviews are cargo-culted nonsense at most non-FAANG companies.
Asking a mid-level engineer to design “Twitter at scale” when the company has 200k MAU and runs everything on a single RDS instance is pointless. Real system design is 95% understanding trade-offs in your actual stack, not reciting CDN → load balancer → cache → sharded MySQL. -
Requiring a degree (or a CS degree) in 2025 is indefensible.
The correlation between having a CS degree and being a good engineer approaches zero after ~3 years of experience. -
Behavioral interviews using STAR format are painful and low-signal.
Most candidates rehearse the same three stories. You learn more in ten minutes of casual conversation than in an hour of “Tell me about a time you had a conflict…” -
Live coding is fine, but whiteboard coding is cruel and unusual punishment.
Forcing someone to write bug-free code without autocomplete, documentation, or the ability to run it is artificial. Pair programming on a real IDE (or even a CoderPad/Replit) is vastly superior. -
Rejecting candidates for one bad interview out of five is lazy.
People have off-days. Smart companies use the best signal, not the worst. -
Most “senior” interview loops are actually testing staff/principal skills.
Companies want someone who can already do the job two levels above what they’re hiring for, then pay them as a senior and complain they “lack impact.”
These opinions are unpopular because the current interview industry (bootcamps, LeetCode Premium, coaching, etc.) is a multi-billion-dollar ecosystem that benefits from the status quo. Changing any of this would threaten a lot of business models and egos.
References:
- The Software Engineering Interview Process Is Broken – Gergely Orosz
- Why LeetCode-Style Interviews Fail – Charity Majors
- Take-Home Assignments Suck – Thomas Ptacek