Coding interviews: maybe they are fair, and maybe I complain too much

Tis the recruiting season. For software engineers, this also means that it is interview preparation season. Software engineering interviews are like no other industry. There is very little emphasis on soft, interpersonal skills. Perhaps surprisingly, there is also little to no emphasis on software engineering practices and the day to day work that a software engineer does. Rather, the hiring process emphasizes intense, algorithmic questions:

Find the longest palindromic substring. Given an array of stock prices, maximize your return by finding the best times to buy and sell a stock. Construct a binary tree given the in order and preorder traversals.

If you’re reading that and don’t understand all the jargon, I feel you. Even good software engineers, without lots of interview prep, couldn’t solve most of the problems that are asked in a typical interview in the industry.

Personally, I love coding. I love software engineering. It’s like playing with legos, trying to connect lots of components together and creating a workable solution to a problem. But I hate interview questions. I’m bad at them, and I don’t practice them enough. They are challenging and very few find them enjoyable. My friends and I spend entire afternoons complaining about the interview process all the time.

Yet as much as I hate the interview process, I admire how equitable the system is. A self-taught programmer with very little experience and no college degree can get a prestigious job at Google making well over six figures if they can solve these questions. Companies don’t care about where you go to school. They don’t care about the connections you have (usually). All they want to see is how good of a problem solver you are.

In a perfect world, you should be rewarded for your capabilities, not the resume boosters you were handed on a silver platter by your well connected parents. And the software engineering interview process emphasizes this to a degree that few other industries do. You are judged by the present, not the past.

So while I hate preparing for them, my interviews are fair. When I don’t study enough and fail, it’s not because I didn’t have the opportunities. Anybody with access to the internet is able to get all the resources they need to study up and get a well paying job. I can complain all I want, but at the end of the day I have to admire how fair my industry is.