Tedious Interview Culture

Hello, community! I am a product manager with two patents to my name. I am frequently involved in the recruitment process and have conducted nearly 500 interviews for multiple product-based companies

Hello, community! I am a product manager with two patents to my name. I am frequently involved in the recruitment process and have conducted nearly 500 interviews for multiple product-based companies over the past decade. Most candidates have cleared at least two rounds of technical interviews and a screening round filled with all sorts of unnecessary data structure and logic-based problems. Some of these are IQ-based, copied from top companies' interviews. Recently, we had an 85% rejection rate for a developer position that needed to be filled in the first two rounds. The offered package was fairly competitive, with a budget of 24-30 LPA for candidates with 4–8 years of experience. After reviewing a few interview recordings, I found it frustrating to realize that even I wouldn't have cracked these interviews in my prime as a developer. Many of these questions were lifted from online dynamic programming sites, interview prep material from top companies, IQ questionnaires, and even fake government sites offering competitive exam tips (yes, I'm talking about civil services!). Here are some examples of such questions that I find completely ridiculous: 1. Dynamic Programming: Given n non-negative integers representing an elevation map where the width of each bar is 1, compute how much water it can trap after raining. 2. Copied from a tech giant (probably found online): Given the sequence of numbers: 1, 11, 21, 1211, 111221, … determine the pattern and write a function to compute the next element. 3. A bizarre IQ question: You have two candles, each burning for exactly one hour but at an uneven rate. You also have a box of matches. Measure 45 minutes and 15 minutes. 4. Something from Instagram for UPSC: What moves upward but never downward? At first glance, one might think, Hey, these seem like good interview questions! Absolutely not. Let me explain why each of them is irrelevant: 1. Dynamic Programming: Trapping Rainwater The company I work for, as well as the Tier 1 & Tier 2 companies I have worked with, have never encountered such problems in real-world development. I understand the obsession with optimizing everything to O(1) complexity, but this level of optimization is only necessary when you're building a framework—which 90% of us will never do! When was the last time you had to design a super-efficient algorithm from scratch? That’s the work of mathematicians and researchers publishing papers! Most real-world problems can be solved using hashing, indexing, or modular code. What exactly is this question testing? Data structures? The ability to fetch data from a table using MongoDB? Our product doesn’t even require this level of problem-solving. Instead, I’d be more interested in whether the candidate understands multi-threading and distributed execution, such as MapReduce—because that is what we actually use! This requirement was clearly mentioned in our job description. Heck, it took me 15 minutes just to understand the problem when I looked it up online. 2. Number Sequence Pattern Recognition This is just as irrelevant as the first one. Moreover, tech giants at least provide learning materials beforehand, offer sample questions, and allow candidates to swap questions (I know this because I have been part of the interview process and changed my question twice!). They focus on assessing problem-solving ability, not just the ability to solve a predefined question. 3. Candle Burn Time Puzzle What relevance does this have to a development role? Even in a service-based company, no client will demand that all employees pass an IQ test. And logically speaking, why are we using candles in the modern era? What about environmental factors affecting burn rates? Why not just use watches, timers, or atomic clocks? As an engineer, I have never needed candles to measure code performance—just profilers and timers. 4. The “Goes Up But Not Down” Riddle Is this a brain teaser, or is it supposed to assess technical skills? When I asked the interviewer for the answer, they said stairs. So, I asked, What if your stairs connect two planets? Which way is "up" in outer space?* The Real Issue with These Interviews I had to reprimand these interviewers—not just for asking irrelevant questions, but because even those who cracked these interviews struggled with basic real-world problems. When I interacted with successful candidates, I found that 80% of them couldn't answer fundamental development-related questions, such as: 1. How can I add custom headers to an API response? 2. Can you explain how to add and trigger a custom event? 3. How do you manage a thread pool and handle services? All in all, If you're conducting technical interviews, ensure that your questions are relevant to the role. Interviewing should be more of a conversation rather than a robotic Q&A session. It should involve pair programming to solve real-world problems. After all, you’ll be working with this person in the future, so finding someone who aligns with your team’s workflow is crucial. P.S.: I’m not against Leetcode, IQ questions, or challenging yourself with problem-solving exercises. But the purpose of an interview is to assess whether a candidate possesses the minimum required problem-solving skills and technical knowledge to fulfill the role—not to test their ability to crack puzzles that have no real-world relevance. Have you faced any such interview where questions are irrelevant to the role you are working on?