That means that regardless of the format, interviews are always going to be inherently unfair. Even the slightest hint of incompetence will nuke your chances. Assessing a person you’ve never met is just an inherently noisy process, and there’s always going to be false negatives. And almost every company in the world would much rather be safe than fair. You probably are having a bad day or misunderstood the question, but employers can’t afford to take that risk.

For the interviewees part, the process is just plain soul draining. You’re literally subjecting your life’s work to the harsh, quick and unfair judgement of people you’ve never met. You’re putting yourself in a position of extreme vulnerability, and it’s easy to feel like a piece of meat.

I don’t really see how twiddling with the format will change the fundamental dynamics. The only thing I can say is that both sides should have more understanding and sympathy for the other.

Candidates, don’t take any single rejection too personally. Remember the interviewer is a person, who also can be having a shitty day or make mistakes. Interviewers be kind and positive and give constructive feedback, even for the clear no’s.

If you really hate interviewing, then spend more time networking. Hiring personal contacts and recommendations is much less noisy/risky, and therefore an overall less adversarial process.

I may be kidding myself but I do think having an interviewer who gives a damn and recognizes "the industry" standard sucks is key. I disagree with you in that I do actually care about (aspects of) the solution, but that's not all I care about. Interviewers disagree with each other all the time on better ways to interview, but there's a whole class of interviewers who just don't care and will perform whatever HR or their manager or some other interviewer tells them to do. I think these also get the most complaints from interviewees. The possible exception is if you actually have a robust work-sample test with objective metrics.

Whatever the case interviewers should strive to make sure interviewees understand the parameters of the interview rather than hope the interviewees can read minds. Not all interviewers believe "it's a conversation" and some will penalize you if you ask questions, some will penalize you if you don't ask questions... As an interviewee it's an adversarial experience and without any indication from the interviewer to set expectations to the contrary it's no wonder interviewees will be guarded or choke or whatever else.

I don't like to give straight-up algorithm problems like "implement this data structure and one or two common client use cases for testing". But interviewees should prepare for it, even if they're not fresh grads, because "the industry" sucks at interviewing. What if you're forced to give an algorithm-type problem by someone higher up? I think interviewers who give a damn even a little can make this significantly better than the default archetype characterized by complaints.

For the interview I got hired from most recently I had the fortune of having interviewers who weren't robotic, they said "use any language you like, can you implement a stack?" and I typed "In python, stack = []". They had me elaborate a little, then we talked a bit about Python, I mentioned it can also be a queue if they wanted as the built-in array is quite flexible, then they had me do some other stuff. Having brainfarted "implement a stack with plain native arrays holding ints in Java (and the clever implementation of a stack with memory by self-referencing an object of itself)" in a prior interview I'm aware that even basic stuff can end up taking many minutes of time, I'm sure my interviewers thought that most candidates would take a certain number of minutes for the stack question, but they were dynamic and could ask other things rather than waste both our time. Meanwhile another interviewer I worked with did an interview where he gave someone a "standard" "reverse this string" problem and the person responded in Python with something like "str[::-1]" or similarly concise, but coworker made them do it again in the "standard" way. No, instead that should have been an indication to move on to a more interesting problem.

If I were made to give a linked list problem and someone responded with a good old (cons) from 1959 we'd be done. I wouldn't make them (defstruct) and (defun) their poor equivalent but instead move on to a more interesting algorithm problem that can use linked lists as a building block, e.g. something involving a BFS or DFS (and even though I like iterative versions of such they might very well hit me with a recursive solution, and that'd be fine). Back to the twitter thread I don't think the reason the linked list has endured has anything to do with lower power computers back in the day, since it was a common abstraction on much weaker hardware and came built-in with a variety of popular languages long predating C and long after C.

And I believe this is why this discussion always keeps popping up. And it makes you discard a lot of "possibly great" candidates at the cost of "almost none of them bad".

It is the eternal precision vs recall tradeoff.

I've been working 10 years, can get things up and running pretty fast, learn fast, but I'm super anxious in interview (and I've done hundreds). I'm just an anxious person, so most of the time I completely freeze up. Perhaps finding a better way to interview is a better way to hire for diversity.

I think there are two camps of people: truly incompetent liars that look good on paper and people just straight up bad at interviewing who are perfectly qualified. So how do you give the latter a fighting chance?

My take is that it's all pretty arbitrary, at the end of the day. Most interviewers do not 1) spend time putting the candidate at ease, 2) ask the same interview questions across candidates for the same position, 3) really introspect about whether they are doing it well.

Interviews are a notoriously terrible way to get a good grasp of how someone will do on the job, and most interviewers in my experience do not recognize that. The more an interviewer is convinced they are good at it, the more they really just suffer from Dunning-Kruger. No interviewer ever feels like they have failed when they reject a candidate, although it's very well possible that they did, and badly.

Point is, to land a competitive position, you have to nail the basics (but you probably wouldn't be flying anywhere if you didn't), but you also have to prove that you would fit the "corporate culture." Don't underestimate it--it's basically the only way an interviewer can justify not hiring a candidate whose skills are otherwise perfectly in sync.

Call it tragedy of the commons, but being honest is not an optimal way to play the game.

So, as is normal in life, I expect it is complicated.

Being several times on the hiring end of that conversation, there's a class of great people that are very hard to identify over an interview. It feels quite bad to suggest a no-go in those cases, but living through such choices, sometimes for years, increases the fear of mishaps.

These days I mainly look at track record. Involvement in projects, conversations, issues filed, quick hacks, etc. Often language or tech doesn't even matter, as long as there's flexibility and an ability to talk over problems.

I've had my share of the second kind, which were without exception some of the most unpleasant interviews I've ever gone on.

My worst interview ever was with Facebook when a non-native, new college grad gave me a Leetcode hard problem in half-broken english and went back to his work without even looking up or walking with me through the problem.