No matter how many times I see it, I just can't stop being frustrated with recruiters advising candidates with actual real-world experience to specifically prepare for their interviews, going as far as offering coaching from their own engineers.
1. An interview is not a college exam, don't treat me as a student.
2. It's the job of your interviewers to find out what I know and if it matches what you need.
3. If you can't, your interviewing is broken. Fix it, don't put it on me.
@isagalaev they often say, experience is not what they are selecting for. Rather, the ability to learn quickly and comply with arbitrary rules.
But personally I share your frustration.
@isagalaev well, that's a question of what we mean by an "actual engineer". It appears to me that those two kinds are not mutually exclusive, and both are capable of doing epic things (possibly within different environments though).
@isagalaev would you work for those big ones if they did interviews in a way you prefer?
@lesnov the decision of working at a company depends on a lot more than the interviewing process of course. But making it not suck would definitely help :-)
@lesnov oh I agree, that it all kinda works: engineers who can do work tend to be also capable of preparing for CS-basics interviews. I still don't like doing it, and I still think it's the companies' problem they can't do it any other way.
Smaller teams are better at it, as I noticed. So I tend to work in those :-)