Young whippersnappers are going to downvote me for sharing, but I'm on the other side of the divide and have had to interview and be interviewed a lot over the years.
The normal tech interview questions about sorting or recursion or whatever are not supposed to be business-relevant questions, they are to filter out people who simply can't program.
The industry is awash with candidates with ok-seeming resumes, that get through HR screening, but then fail miserably at the tech interview to solve something like fizzbuzz.
My anecdotal experience is that you never want people who can't write a for-loop or whatever in your team, whatever you are doing!
The tech interview with the ludicrously simple questions are all about finding people who 'get it', and are actually effective at it. Which is why it persists.
The good news is there are interviewers like me who have been lucky enough to be in the position to hire people on the strength of them being able to work through things in pseudo code even though they are not familiar with any programming languages. I keep interviewing and hiring physics grads on the strength of their excellent problem solving skills, and they all learn to express that in programming languages in short order once they are hired and they have found employment as a programmer...
The normal tech interview questions about sorting or recursion or whatever are not supposed to be business-relevant questions, they are to filter out people who simply can't program.
The industry is awash with candidates with ok-seeming resumes, that get through HR screening, but then fail miserably at the tech interview to solve something like fizzbuzz.
My anecdotal experience is that you never want people who can't write a for-loop or whatever in your team, whatever you are doing!
The tech interview with the ludicrously simple questions are all about finding people who 'get it', and are actually effective at it. Which is why it persists.
The good news is there are interviewers like me who have been lucky enough to be in the position to hire people on the strength of them being able to work through things in pseudo code even though they are not familiar with any programming languages. I keep interviewing and hiring physics grads on the strength of their excellent problem solving skills, and they all learn to express that in programming languages in short order once they are hired and they have found employment as a programmer...