That is a good way to eliminate bias, but in the end, is that a good way to make sure each position is staffed by the best candidate possible?
I always pondered about that when I was at Google. We had mostly smart people, but I argue not all of them were the perfect fit for the position/skills needed.
Sure some bias are best eliminated such as what school they went to, but if work experience in general should not be discarded completely in my opinion and you can only get so much out of standard algo/DS questions, especially considering these days everyone is studying for those like standardized tests.
I literally know some CS students who just did hundreds and hundreds of practice problems and they'd ace most big company algo interviews but that doesn't really tell me if they'd be good engineers in practice at all.
That reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend who works at Amazon in Seattle.
He says they have to fire guys in his team frequently because they ace the interview process by practicing it ad nauseum but are terrible software engineers.
Sadly that’s the trade off when you want a common benchmark to measure students, but then students optimize for that benchmark instead of something else — basically Goodhart’s law.
As a current student studying CS, I find all of this “leetcoding” disheartening since it unnecessarily takes away time and deprives some people of passion.
I always pondered about that when I was at Google. We had mostly smart people, but I argue not all of them were the perfect fit for the position/skills needed.
Sure some bias are best eliminated such as what school they went to, but if work experience in general should not be discarded completely in my opinion and you can only get so much out of standard algo/DS questions, especially considering these days everyone is studying for those like standardized tests.
I literally know some CS students who just did hundreds and hundreds of practice problems and they'd ace most big company algo interviews but that doesn't really tell me if they'd be good engineers in practice at all.