Why Do Big Companies Ask Unrealistic Software Engineering Interview Questions?

Tom Smykowski
4 min readJan 15, 2024

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.

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Tom Smykowski
Tom Smykowski

Written by Tom Smykowski

Software Engineer & Tech Editor. Top 2% on StackOverflow, 3mil views on Quora. Won Shattered Pixel Dungeon.

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