Why Coding Interviews Are Getting So Hard?

And can it get better?

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

There are three types of technical interviews:

• coding
• system design
• behavior

The coding interview is the most essential to software engineers.

For entry-level software engineers, they may face 3–5 rounds of interviews. Each round of interviews ranges from 45 minutes to 1 hour, and they are most likely all coding interviews. Sure we also mix a few behavior questions in between. But they won’t hold as much weight since the candidates wouldn’t have a whole lot of interesting stories to share anyway.

For more senior roles, i.e., tech leads, and managers, we put more weight on system design and behavior questions. Nevertheless, coding will still be in the picture. Since we have to make sure that the candidates have at least the computer science fundamentals and know what software engineer is all about.

Today, let’s focus on just coding interviews — how it comes to be and why it becomes so hard nowadays.

The Rocky Road To Become a Coding Interviewer

Compared to the other two types of interviews, coding interviews are certainly easier to learn.

If you want to become an interviewer for coding interviews, the training process is more or less the following:

1. Come up with a new problem
2. Test the new problem on your fellow colleagues
3. Test the new problem on candidates
4. Graduate as a certified interviewer

Coming up with a new interview problem is the trickiest and most time-consuming.

• The problem’s complexity needs to be just right. If it is too hard, then no one can pass. If it is too easy, then everybody can pass. In either case, it is hard to tell the good candidates apart from the bad.
• The problem needs to be creative. Ideally, it should be a problem that cannot be found on the internet directly. Otherwise, we’ll be hiring people that have seen the problems beforehand instead of those that are smart.
• The problem should be interesting. It is a…