Readit NewsThe tech industry has unfortunately adopted the methodology of centralized hackable tests as the canonical gatekeeping method in the form of programming interviews.
Most big tech companies don't care about how good you have been at delivering some value through creating software: they want to see you deliver a very specific type of performance at a whiteboard. Interviewers are given specific math puzzle questions to ask. Interviewees are explicitly told by the same companies' hiring departments that they should aim to hack the system by studying books like "Cracking the Code Interview".
This is an industry that prides itself on supposedly making data-driven decisions through A/B testing. When it comes to hiring people to make those decisions, everybody just plays along to a decades-old script.
When I started preparing for interviewing, I spent most of my times studying general data structures & algorithms and practicing applying them to different problems. I don't think this is so bad and can lead to a lot of learning you wouldn't do otherwise.
The frustrating thing, is how easy it is to hack the test. After one particular interview, I remember talking to a friend about how hard the technical interview was. He told me that he had already seen the problem and knew it would come up because he bought leetcode premium for the interview. Kind of frustrating to spend hours and hours learning data structures and algorithms when the real key to success is getting lucky and memorizing the problem before hand
If I understood risk, consistent effort, and emotions better, I would have retired in my mid twenties.