michael_mroczka

A common misconception is that Gayle's original book put forth the "right" way to do interviews. Gayle neither invented or encouraged the current interview structure. Gayle discusses the timeline in more depth in a Blind AMA thread you can find online. I think a lot of people are under the impression that books like thes somehow steer the interview process toward this style of interview. At this point, all we are doing is looking at the process as it is TODAY, and trying to help provide transparency and equal information to everyone. We spend several chapters in this book talking about how broken the process is and making similar points to you, but we can't write a book on an interview process that doesn't exist and while Gayle's original book is well-circulated, she (or any of the rest of us authors) doesn't have sway over how big tech companies conduct their hiring.

The reality is, there’s no “interview police” making sure interviewers are asking great questions or grading on the right things. Speed, for example, is often overrated—it usually comes at the expense of correctness. While the interviewing.io learning center covers general patterns, our book takes things further by organizing topics based on dependencies, likelihood of being asked, and difficulty. We believe that the order in which you learn these topics really matters. Of course, most people won’t aim to learn everything—the focus should be on what’s most relevant given the time before an interview.

To answer your specific question, the book assumes you’ll typically have around 20–35 minutes to solve a problem completely. Some companies approach things differently—Meta, for instance, often asks two questions per interview and places a bigger emphasis on speed. That said, Meta interviews tend to be more straightforward these days, with a common study strategy being to sort tagged Meta-questions on LeetCode and work through the top 100. This is literally the process they encourage.

The good news? We’ve got solid data showing that most big tech interviews (outside of Meta) don’t put nearly as much pressure on speed. Of course, statistically, there will be other people expecting two questions per interview, but this isn't as common as the average Blind post would you have think.

We discuss speed in the book and how to get better, but it is similar to the old Marksman adage, "Slow is smooth, Smooth is fast." Speed comes with time, and without knowing how much time you already put in (or how you've been practicing), it is difficult to say a lot more beyond that. Feel free to ping me on the interviewing.io server if you want to discuss this further and I might be able to help.

EDIT: One extra thought. The resources you used to prepare on interviewing.io are very different from what is in this book (and the book content I'll say with humility is much better—and I wrote a lot of both). Don't take our word for it. You can check out the binary search topic in the interviewing.io Learning Center (which you can see I wrote) and then check out our binary search chapter at the link below for free (which I almost mainly wrote). You'll find the book materials are highly divergent (for the better).

There’s actually some interesting data on this here: How hard is it to cheat with ChatGPT in technical interviews?

Even AI experts point out that parroting tutorials isn’t real reasoning, and that’s still a tough spot for AI.

All that said, even if AI improves, I still think this book offers a lot of value. It’s packed with new templates and practical strategies to help you get unstuck during interviews—stuff based on data from over 100,000 mock interviews. No pressure if it’s not your thing, but if you’re curious, you can check out some of the technical (and non-technical) chapters at the link below. They cover approaches you definitely won’t see ChatGPT come up with. :)