Comment by blisterpeanuts

After 20 years in software, I had a phone interview with an Amazon guy who sounded half my age (at most). Asked me to write some kind of function to do something, sort some stuff or some such. I described verbally how I would do it, almost line by line, in pseudo-code. He said "I need you to write it out in [some language]". I said "But why? I just told you how I'd do it." But he needed me to literally write the code out, as though I couldn't easily copy-and-paste something for him. I thanked him and hung up. All I learned from that encounter is that I'd be very unhappy working with people like him. Bullet dodged. Sure, I use my knowledge of algorithms, and I frequently look such things up on StackOverflow and improve my knowledge; we all do. But these interviews seem designed to filter out experienced, pragmatic programmers and just bring in more cookie-cutter software engineering BS/MS recent grads who speak their language. A far cry from the startup environment that most of these companies began as!