> The bus driver’s watch was broken, and he needed to time 15 minutes. Luckily I had with me two ropes of varying density, both of which burn for exactly one hour…

Light both ends of one rope and one end of another. When the first rope is burnt, the time starts, light the other end of the second rope--it should burn for 15 minutes.

Cut one rope in four?

"Varying density".

Okay, I thought the two ropes had different densities.

It gives me peace of mind knowing that hospitals require all of their physicians to quickly solve p-chem problems during whiteboard interviews.

To be fair, physicians take their exams upfront instead of per job interviews: MCAT (7 hours long), STEP 1 (8 hours long), STEP 2 (9 hours long), STEP 3 (2 days), along with recertification exams every decade.

That's actually a lot better - take it once and be done for every workplace.

SV "technical" interviews are (perhaps) like being asked to retake a piece of the MCAT on a whiteboard at every interview.

Another alternative of course is the take-home exam where for 20 different companies you have to do 8 hours of work for them without compensation.

I tried interviewing at a couple of FAANGs without the prescribed 'leetcoding' prep work. And failed each time. I see my career as being pretty successful despite those failures, I'm not bitter about the interviews. I believe that passing these tests sends a strong positive signal. Failing the tests send a mild negative signal. But if you're paying top dollar you can afford false negatives especially if you can preserve as many true positives as possible.

If there's a downside it's probably that they are stacking their deck with extreme outliers. Maybe this process ends up selecting undesirable qualities not tested in interviews.

All that said, this was an entertaining read.

Talking about a mismatch between technical interviewing practices and academia on the one hand and the real-life experience on the other...

Of course, this piece is a satire, I am just a bit sad that the author did not show his real day in the life of a professional software engineer as a contrast.

”Between all the Zoom meetings, emails, slack messages, and jira updates, I was finally able to write 5 lines of code.”

Best post of 2020 by far.

It was a good day.