I do the coding screening interview for my company, a semi-large-ish private Bay Area company. If you tried to pull this, it would just result in either you failing the screen due to not completing enough of the problem (or any, depending on if you were willing to do the screen question we asked you), or you'd waste the 10 mins we reserve at the end for you to ask any questions you have when you could be asking a fellow engineer questions about what the work is like etc
You wouldn't fail due to my discretion by the way, I don't have a lot of leeway - to reduce bias, I can only pick one of a few questions to give, and I have to grade you against a rubric. So to pass you'd literally need to get xyz things on the rubric, and if you spent much of the time trying to screen me, I wouldn't be able to check them off for you.
The rigid format is not how I'd do interviews personally? And if it were more free-form id probably be at least intrigued by what question you posed me. But interviewing isn't very well-rewarded work at my company so the dominating strategy as an IC is to do anything you can to minimize the time footprint that interviewing inflicts upon you. Alas.
Anyway, my point is, it's an intriguing move but you're gambling on what kind of interview process you're in.
Same reason they're used in grading. How else do you ensure that "partially correct" is consistently weighted?
Certainly, in college, I recall one calculus problem, we had to find the local maxima or minima of a function, something along those lines. Long and short, I differentiated, plugged in for zero, and made an algebra mistake, got one right, one wrong. Something like that. 5/10. Someone else...differentiated, and ended with the differentiated function set equal to zero, but didn't solve for it. 8/10.
No idea if that was a lack of rubric, or a badly worded rubric ("got one of the maxima/minima wrong = -5 points", "Well, he didn't get either one wrong, so..."), but yeah, a good rubric would have prevented that inconsistency in grading that I still carry with me to this day because it was so unfair.
No, I don't. Because engineering mindset isn't something you can quantify, and I don't care if a senior position isn't able to rattle off all of the 2xx HTTP status codes from memory. Having a conversation with candidates instead of ticking off boxes gives me the absolute strongest signal every time.
This is somewhat of the norm at large places isn't it? I've done interview rounds and was given example questions and more or less told to stick to it otherwise "liability" and "personal bias"
You wouldn't fail due to my discretion by the way, I don't have a lot of leeway - to reduce bias, I can only pick one of a few questions to give, and I have to grade you against a rubric. So to pass you'd literally need to get xyz things on the rubric, and if you spent much of the time trying to screen me, I wouldn't be able to check them off for you.
The rigid format is not how I'd do interviews personally? And if it were more free-form id probably be at least intrigued by what question you posed me. But interviewing isn't very well-rewarded work at my company so the dominating strategy as an IC is to do anything you can to minimize the time footprint that interviewing inflicts upon you. Alas.
Anyway, my point is, it's an intriguing move but you're gambling on what kind of interview process you're in.