Sites like this make me sad. For some reason it reminds me of an article I recently read in the New Yorker about Magnus Carlsen and his comments about how widespread use of chess software and databases is ruining human chess, because people have started to think like the computers. Too much reliance on information, less on originality.
Based on my experience, A lot of tech interviews in large companies nowadays are mostly done by young people who have limited understanding of what a good employee is (because more tech savvy guys don't want to waste time with interviews) and who therefore keep asking rote questions like: "how do you shuffle a deck of cards", or (my favorite) "What is the 'mutable' keyword do?" and string matching the answer to the right one in their minds. This in turn has affected the interview preparation process, consisting mostly of memorizing the answers to the rote questions.
Which (as the architect in The Matrix said) has led the would-be coders, inexorably, here and similar sites.
> Too much reliance on information, less on originality.
I dunno -- if there's a giant, fairly-comprehensive question bank, and you can quickly reproduce from memory a good answer to each question, isn't it just possible you've actually learned the material?
Do people actually ask this. I can't understand if it should be, "What the the mutable keyboard 'do'". I'm not sure of any mutable keywords by the name of "do". Or did you mean "What does the 'mutable' keyword do". Again, I'm not familiar with any popular programming languages with the keyword mutable. If they are just asking for the definition of mutability, that seems a strange question for a technical interview.
From my experience most of these interviews at these big tech companies have these kind of questions. And they suffer from having inexperienced engineers conducting the interviews. I think this is a big, untalked about problem with regard to why tech companies have such a lack of talent.
Based on my experience, A lot of tech interviews in large companies nowadays are mostly done by young people who have limited understanding of what a good employee is (because more tech savvy guys don't want to waste time with interviews) and who therefore keep asking rote questions like: "how do you shuffle a deck of cards", or (my favorite) "What is the 'mutable' keyword do?" and string matching the answer to the right one in their minds. This in turn has affected the interview preparation process, consisting mostly of memorizing the answers to the rote questions.
Which (as the architect in The Matrix said) has led the would-be coders, inexorably, here and similar sites.