No programming position would ever require me to work in such an adversarial setting. I'd quit on the spot if it did.
Having said that, on a personal level, the issue is related to the long-term psychological impact that such practices have on me. I could write entire pages about how I felt during each of the interviews where I was asked to write code and the countless nights I lost sleep due to that, even though some happened over 10 years ago, but, then again, it will only trigger negative emotions that I'm trying really hard to avoid.
Since I'm usually optimistic and a total people pleaser, it took a lot of effort from my side to say never again to this practice after trying in vain for over 8 years to get into FAANG-like companies and, again and again, bumping into yet another person who couldn't resist lecturing me on how "I'm supposed to train myself for such tests". Guess what? I did waste a lot of time training and still I failed dozens of such interviews. Then again, I always managed to land a programming position where the interviewers didn't ask me to code in front of them or under time pressure. I'm at my 8th job now and, after 15 years in this career, I'm confident that I'll never have to put myself through such interviews again, which I make sure to state up front since it's not negotiable.
Yea, I don’t get it. This isn’t describing an adversarial process at all. There’s not intended to be any time pressure either, since the task is chosen to be easy enough to finish in half the available time.
I can certainly understand having gone through annoying interviews; that’s very common. Some interviews are even purposefully designed to be difficult to pass, which can be very frustrating to the candidates. But this question is just asking for a practical demonstration of a candidate’s abilities. It’s not a trick question, it’s not a puzzle, and there’s no secret handshake.
> Yea, I don’t get it. This isn’t describing an adversarial process at all.
You might not be able to get it because you're not me and you likely didn't experience interviews the way I did. However, that doesn't make my perception of this practice invalid. What I mean by adversarial is that you have odds stacked against you, where one party knows exactly what they need to get from you beforehand and your only option is to live to their expectation.
> There’s not intended to be any time pressure either, since the task is chosen to be easy enough to finish in half the available time.
This is not an accurate description of what's happening in reality. Unless you know fairly well up front what the solution needs to look like, Amazon, for example, leaves you with 20 - 25 min to propose a solution, start coding, walk through your thought process, somehow not get nervous if you realise you went down a wrong path, somehow not get angry if your interviewer is smirking at you behind your back (around 2 out of 5 tend to do that based on my experience), somehow focus on the next round even though you know you messed up the previous one and someone made sure to make you feel small for not being able to reason through all the edge cases when having to implement binary search in a sorted and shifted(!!!) array, because hey, it would be too easy to let you get away with implementing classic binary search, wouldn't it?
> But this question is just asking for a practical demonstration of a candidate’s abilities. It’s not a trick question, it’s not a puzzle, and there’s no secret handshake.
It's asking for a specific set of abilities that one might or might not have and their capacity to exercise those abilities varies wildly based on the interview setting. Putting a time constraint on it, even if it's seemingly generous, changes the dynamics drastically. If you're the kind of person who gets nervous in such settings, you can totally get hung up for a good chunk of the allocated time because of some missing semicolon somewhere. It's very easy to confuse the compiler / toolset and have it produce pages and pages of cryptic error messages. When's the last time you had to read through the output generated by some mistyped Autotools syntax?
> I can certainly understand having gone through annoying interviews; that’s very common.
Exactly. I refuse to subject myself to any of this again and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
