Comment by conorh

Every time I read these posts I find them very depressing. Crunch through an enormous bunch of algorithm problems in order to perform well on some unrealistic whiteboard programming (I think the system engineering problems are actually more useful though) - as usual we've focused on the easy to measure metric rather than anything actually useful. Maybe these things are meant to be a proxy for how good you are at other development tasks, but it has never seemed to work out that way to me. Some of the very successful people I know at FAANG companies have told me that they would not pass the algorithm interviews without months of preparation and that they don't really use those skills.