Our Interview System is Fundamentally Broken

After nearly a decade in big tech companies and interviewing at many more, I’ve come to realize something pretty obvious: tech interviews are fundamentally flawed.

Here’s the truth: interviews today don't test how good you are at building software. Instead, they test how well you've prepared to play the "interview game."

You know the drill. You spend days (or even months!) solving LeetCode problems, cramming solutions for puzzles that interviewers casually label as "easy." Of course, it’s easy—after they've glanced at the solution minutes before your interview. But in reality, coming up with those solutions on the spot demands serious DSA intuition, deep pattern recognition, and a fair bit of luck. Expecting candidates to crack these problems in under 15 minutes? That's just unrealistic.

Then comes the infamous system design round. You're asked to design Twitter, Instagram, or a billion-user-scale system in just 40 minutes. Let’s be honest—almost everyone memorizes a basic blueprint because, guess what? In the real world, nobody designs Instagram from scratch using MySQL and Redis on a whiteboard. Real-world system design is messy, iterative, and deeply tied to ever-changing business goals—something these interviews completely ignore.

Our interview process filters out talented engineers who might not be great at memorizing "perfect" solutions but excel at solving real-world problems. The current system rewards polished communication and confident jargon-dropping more than actual engineering skills.

Real-world Engineering Looks Completely Different

Step away from the interviews, and you quickly realize that day-to-day engineering is nothing like these high-pressure puzzle-solving sessions.

You're not reinventing databases or crafting groundbreaking algorithms from scratch. Instead, your daily tasks often look like:

  • Converting one API format into another just because another team needs it differently.

  • Tweaking protobuf schemas while ensuring nothing breaks for existing users.

  • Refactoring code—not because it's broken, but because someone decided to standardize naming conventions.

  • Writing migration scripts for feature flags that everyone forgot existed.

  • Convincing infrastructure teams to adjust rate limits, even if the request later turns out unnecessary.

  • Crafting impressive-sounding documentation to justify simple tasks because promotions depend on narrative more than actual complexity.

  • Adjusting unit tests to hit arbitrary coverage metrics, knowing full well these tests aren't catching real-world issues.

And the kicker? Most of the code you write today won't even matter in a couple of years. It’s just tech debt piling up, waiting to be rewritten. Deadlines loom, priorities shift, and "clean" code becomes a luxury nobody has time for.

When crunch time hits, your messy PR will get approved instantly because, at the end of the day, shipping matters more than beautiful code.

The Real Skill: Adaptability
The best engineers aren't the ones arguing about the "right way" to do things—they're the ones who understand the reality of building software at scale. They're adaptable. They ship fast when needed and optimize carefully when time permits.

Good engineers adapt; great engineers deliver.

Accepting the imperfect reality of tech interviews and software engineering can help you navigate the industry more effectively. Because ultimately, it’s not just about coding skill—it’s about understanding and playing the game well.