HACKER Q&A
📣 ahicks

Getting around the hour-long design interview


I'm a senior/low-end-of-staff engineer. I've worked on the Rust compiler, been coding for 20 years, etc. etc. If you ask me to solve a problem I can solve it.

But I'm going to do so by having lunch or something and come back in 4 hours or tomorrow and then have a whole plan for it. On top of that I failed to specialize because I'm one of those who got into programming because it's interesting. When they say "how do I solve X" I also have to guess which X the interviewer wants this time, and which X I'm going to be able to go deep enough on without having 24 hours to just learn it.

To be clear I'm not asking for a job. I get one recruiter call a day without actively looking. The first level of the funnel isn't a problem.

I'm just thinking that I can't be the only one who hits this wall. SO my question is twofold. Is there a way to filter employers out who are like this? Is there a good way to end run around the problem?

The best idea I've come up with is to start maintaining a GH repo of these and how I'd have solved them, but obviously this is ethically questionable and likely to backfire, even if I don't put company names on it and stick to generalized problems.