I'm a 10+ year systems/networking/DevOps eng. I've seen some shit. I've interviewed over 400 people for a FAANG company.
In my current round of interviews, I've been asked hardly any questions of substance. No situational 'how would you solve this?' type questions. There's some basic questions, a coding interview, and then they want to send me home with homework. It feels like a red flag to me. As if the company is fine with pushing off their incompetence into my free time. Every one of these I've gotten, I think, 'You could have spent 35 minutes walking through a similar problem with me to see if I'm in the right path to solve the issues you have in your day to day. So far, I've just dropped any company that assigns homework. I'm not applying for a Sr. level role, just wanna make widgets and like most of us in this industry, I just read a book and then pull up the docs of the stack I'm working with and figure it out.
It's been so frequent in this recent job search that I can't tell if that's just the way things are done now or if it's a real red flag that says the company won't respect my time or competency.
What gives? Have things changed? Am I out of touch? Is that a red flag or just the way we do things now?
Signal had me write a complete async io http server in Java implementing a simple api in a few hours.
I got half of it done in twice the time but I had fun, I never wrote an http server with select and thought I’d like to try. I did not get the job but I didn’t feel it was a waste of time.
Your mileage may vary.