The Controversy Surrounding Coding Interviews: Unfair, Useless, and Dumb?

Lorik Gagica
3 min readJun 10, 2023

So, coding interviews… Yeah, they’ve been around in the tech industry for a while now. They’re supposed to gauge your technical skills, problem-solving abilities, and coding prowess. But hold on a sec! Are these interviews actually unfair, useless, and, dare I say it, dumb? Let’s dig deeper and explore the controversy surrounding coding interviews, with all their limitations, biases, and potential drawbacks.

1. Can They Capture Real-World Skills?

One of the big gripes about coding interviews is how they fail to represent real-world skills. They’re all about algorithmic problem-solving, data structures, and time complexity analysis. But hey, guess what? Practical software development is way more diverse than that! So, you could be a rockstar software engineer who builds killer systems or knows the ins and outs of a particular tech stack, but these interviews might not even scratch the surface of your talents. Bummer, right?

2. Pressure Cooker Predicament

Imagine this: You’re in a coding interview, and the pressure is on. Time is ticking away, and you’re expected to come up with brilliant solutions on the spot. Talk about anxiety-inducing! The stress, the expectations, the judgmental eyes of the…

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Lorik Gagica

BSc & MA in Urbanism, Politics and Sociology || Tech aficionado || The more you know, the less they fool you. That’s why I like to share knowledge.⁣