Ask HN: What's with all the unpaid interview projects?
Unpopular opinion: Interview problem is a solved problem for software engineer candidates for majority of use cases, it is called Data Structures and Algorithm.<p>Yes I&#x27;ve tried the other two: take home tests, work one day at company X. They all suck. They all optimized for the suffering of the software engineer candidates. You can&#x27;t do multiple companies take home tests, it is a waste of time. You can&#x27;t do multiple work one day at company X, Y, Z. Waste of time. And after all of those time wasters they still reject you for non obvious reasons such as cultural fit, pay, seniority level, etc.<p>Just cut to the chase, give me DS &amp; A questions and be done with it.<p>Data Structures and Algorithms are the best mean to interview. Study once, apply multiple times to multiple companies and kill those and get multiple offers, with bonus it makes you a better engineer (at least in my case), though later it gives diminishing returns. You can jump companies every year easily with this skill.<p>But then people will ask, &quot;how does that gauge software engineering skills?&quot; or &quot;what if you aren&#x27;t good at data structures and algorithms but you are good at something else like design, product, css, etc&quot; or &quot;there are more to working than just data structures and algorithms&quot; or &quot;you will get similar people in your talent pipeline&quot;.<p>I don&#x27;t know, that&#x27;s not the problem of the software engineer candidates, that&#x27;s the problem of the companies. Let them deal with it. We software engineer candidates just play the game, get the job or rejected from the job, and do the job, go home, collect paycheck, sleep, play, exercise, use our mind, talent and energy doing something else.