Always been curious how “workload” is assigned and estimated for software engineers.
In: 92
Either by asking you questions about coding that are hard to answer without several years experience or through a dumb test:
The industry picked a few small, easily memorised tasks that have nothing to do with the job you have to do and ask you to do one of them at an interview. It’s like doing 2 questions from a high school geography exam before being accepted as the civil engineer in charge of a huge bridge. Sure geography is slightly related, and if you studied it 8 years ago then the question will probably still be in your head, but it is a laughable proxy for the skills you will actually need.
Tasks include: implementation of an algorithm for shortest path, sorting a list of numbers, solving a logic puzzle or manipulating a data structure in a pointless way.
All of these are about high school level maths difficulty, have been done before and can easily be found online, but are impossible to complete in 8 minutes while the interviewer looks over your shoulder at every line you write unless you already know how. They will gladly fail you if you don’t finish the task even if you have a credible CV that marks you as a senior developer with a ton of experience building much more complicated systems.
In summary, they don’t, but if they do, they do it badly.
Latest Answers