Why Do Big Companies Ask Unrealistic Software Engineering Interview Questions?

Thank you for reading my article here. Reading my articles on Medium means I’ll be able to write!

I am a software developer and designer for 16 years. Worked in corporations, small companies, startups and as a software consultant. Also had a company that hired software developers. I can answer this question.

I will write why some companies ask unrealistic dev questions, why it is silly and why it’s not a problem.

When studying I wanted to become intern at Microsoft in the US. After 5-hour travel to the interview I was glad because i was about to meet my dev hero these days. He was holding the interview.

Until this time i was active at college dev groups hosting a lots of them. Also served a lots to people learning programming at online dev groups. So i had some basic dev knowledge.

Interview started. It was so fast. I had like 10 questions, one by one, about other languages than interview was about, about some very nerdy dillema only maybe 10 people thought had answer to. The interview ended like in 15 minutes. No talk. Just shooting with questions. The interview ended and I went to travel 5 hours back to home.

My world just collapsed. I was shocked. I felt ashamed i didn’t know the answers. I surely had to know them. Was dissapointed of myself and felt it was really stupid thing to imagine such company would take such an idiot like me as a intern.

But it was one side of the coin.

One thing was i felt my guru just didn’t care and it felt like he was just showing off and wanted to show how little i know.

I didn’t feel like my guru was in any way interested in my humble person. Like i was no one. Not like I was expecting anything special. Just anything people normally do to make a kindly connection. Heck. Sentence like “I have some questions for you” would make it a lots nicer.

So it was it. I suppose I dont need to write I didn’t get the internship. Eventually it turned out to end up great for me because i found better job. And guru? Well… guru was off my list.

Maybe i don’t know everything. Also maybe I can not think straight while in…