I've never been given any puzzles in a tech job interview.
In my interview for the coding bootcamp I attended, I was asked, "if a small nuclear bomb was going off in an hour at the Domain (a mixed use development in North Austin with a mall, a bunch of hotels, a good amount of tech businesses, and a ton of personal condominium residences), how would you go about evacuating as many Austinites as possible to get them out of range?"
I honestly wish more places would ask questions like this of junior and entry-level developers. They're actually useful for interviewing people who may not have good whiteboarding skills yet or be able to produce working code quickly.
Instead, I once interviewed for an entry-level position at one company that was small enough that it was the CEO doing the interviewing, and where they knew that I don't have a CS degree and instead had graduated from the local bootcamp less than a year before (one of the other interviewers was a regular mentor at this bootcamp and knew the curriculum at least in passing), where they asked me about binary tree traversals and were surprised when I looked at them blankly. This entry-level position, by the way, was a client-facing support engineer thing that mostly consisted of spinning up Rails apps, adding a few reasonably documented customizations, debugging API calls, and then doing a bit of technical writing to document the apps for the clients or the bugs for the greater engineering team as needed. I was more than qualified for that job, but was totally set up to fail that interview, because they had no idea how to interview for the position.
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In my interview for the coding bootcamp I attended, I was asked, "if a small nuclear bomb was going off in an hour at the Domain (a mixed use development in North Austin with a mall, a bunch of hotels, a good amount of tech businesses, and a ton of personal condominium residences), how would you go about evacuating as many Austinites as possible to get them out of range?"
I honestly wish more places would ask questions like this of junior and entry-level developers. They're actually useful for interviewing people who may not have good whiteboarding skills yet or be able to produce working code quickly.
Instead, I once interviewed for an entry-level position at one company that was small enough that it was the CEO doing the interviewing, and where they knew that I don't have a CS degree and instead had graduated from the local bootcamp less than a year before (one of the other interviewers was a regular mentor at this bootcamp and knew the curriculum at least in passing), where they asked me about binary tree traversals and were surprised when I looked at them blankly. This entry-level position, by the way, was a client-facing support engineer thing that mostly consisted of spinning up Rails apps, adding a few reasonably documented customizations, debugging API calls, and then doing a bit of technical writing to document the apps for the clients or the bugs for the greater engineering team as needed. I was more than qualified for that job, but was totally set up to fail that interview, because they had no idea how to interview for the position.