I just took your first and last sentences and had some fun with it.
That way of interviewing is good, because it weeds out people who don't prepare and thus might be lazy or just looking for an easy paycheck. But it also tends to confuse good memory of technical and abstract questions as competence, and if you're not careful you'll end up with a lot of copy pasted humans that are really good at inverting binary trees, but suck at everything else. Also people who have already passed it tend to hold on to it as pride, and might fail an otherwise amazing candidate, just because of a failure on a question that has no practical use outside of a textbook. Those are my thoughts on it, and I'd wager the thoughts of many others who are critical of the model.
> Do you really think the secret sauce to getting into highly competitive jobs is by incoherently speed running through algorithm questions?
No, the real secret sauce is having a friend or relative on the inside. If you don't have that it's a gamble most of the time imo.
That way of interviewing is good, because it weeds out people who don't prepare and thus might be lazy or just looking for an easy paycheck. But it also tends to confuse good memory of technical and abstract questions as competence, and if you're not careful you'll end up with a lot of copy pasted humans that are really good at inverting binary trees, but suck at everything else. Also people who have already passed it tend to hold on to it as pride, and might fail an otherwise amazing candidate, just because of a failure on a question that has no practical use outside of a textbook. Those are my thoughts on it, and I'd wager the thoughts of many others who are critical of the model.
> Do you really think the secret sauce to getting into highly competitive jobs is by incoherently speed running through algorithm questions?
No, the real secret sauce is having a friend or relative on the inside. If you don't have that it's a gamble most of the time imo.