Careful there! I'm an introvert, which means I get energy to recharge when alone and drain down when I'm interacting with others, as opposed to extroverts who get their energy interacting from others and drain down when alone. I'm also pretty damn forceful in a group dynamic, I think the last thing someone would ever say was that I was trampled on! Us introverts get a bit upset when you confuse us with those who lack social skills or are timid.
Didn't mean to offend. Im an introvert as well. Apologies @Aquarians I dont mean to hijack your thread but I appear to be on the defence after my post Edit: Actually you are right @Sig I should have rather said timid and lacking social skills instead of introvert...now that I think about it
Programming interviews have a lot more in common with "Jewish Problems" than rigorous, objective and impartial curriculum. Like 99% of first and 1% of the second. Compare them with university admission problems. a) Universities: there's a well-known curriculum you have to know (high school math & physics for engineering disciplines). The curriculum is shared among universities and departments. Companies (including giants such as Facebook, Google, JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs): every department has it's own ideas with the only common thing is that you've nothing but a vague idea what they want. b) Universities: the curriculum is public. Companies: deep secrecy. God forbid you find out something remotely resembling a "curriculum", they'd have to drop it all and redo the Jewish problems. c) Universities: the tests are public. Companies: again, private. There's no possibility to peer review and contest the abuse. d) Universities: lots of candidates are tested at the same time. Each candidate's test is archived and can be consulted and if the candidate feels the mark he received is grossly mistaking, he can request an audit and an independent re-evaluation of his work. Companies: again, privacy is the hallmark of abuse. So if you're in for some Jewish problems, go ahead, apply to jobs and participate in this charade.
So in summary, the first major problem of programming interviews is the arbitrary curriculum and discretionary evaluation. On a side note, your experience is useless. Whatever the job specs may say, like you're working on the greatest system ever built with the smartest humans ever to have lived, that's a blatant lie. And they don't even notice the cognitive dissonance between their interview process and the lie they're reciting and selling to suckers. You've got on your CV *years* and *years* of the *exact* same experience, building the exact same systems. Could be high frequency, low latency high throughput servers. Could be high volume realtime risk management systems. Could be in-depth and at the same time broad and accurate pricing libraries. You're hired to do the exact same crap and the imbecile 24 years old "hiring managers" test you exclusively though their obtuse and barely-out-of-teenage view of the world, that is high school algorithms and irrelevant quizes. And the imbeciles above them agree with all this because they don't know any better anyways and are just glad to have been put some distance between them and the low level shoveling. So unless you're building your *own* product where you actually have to be productive and profitable, ignore any flagwaving about company culture and career crap, do the bare minimum to keep your job and practice high-school programming competition algorithms and teenage quizes because that's all what being at the bottom of the corporate feudal system is all about.
No, they're disguised IQ questions. GOOG et al can't ask straightforwardly "what were your SAT (or other highly IQ-loaded test) scores?"
What makes you think GOOG can't ask for SAT scores? They probably don't because they aren't a particularly strong predictor of college success, let alone success after college. Given the other information available with proven predictive value, it would be foolish to use them in any way to evaluate a mid-career software developer! BTW, intelligence alone is itself a poor predictor of success. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a job like a software developer.
HR departments have become very skittish about asking for information that isn't specifically job-related, and that could be construed as evidence of bias in the hiring process. Brain-teasers and write-a-bubble-sorts are on the right side of the line, but SAT and IQ scores are a grey area.