I tried this with Google and got the &quot;Well... bye&quot; response. I was contacted by a recruiter who said she &quot;specializes in finding candidates who are already employed&quot;. As I guess it goes with Google, she didn&#x27;t even have a position in mind, she just wanted to put me in the generic hiring funnel. Now, I&#x27;m not even a developer; I&#x27;m a researcher with a PhD in computer engineering, and a BS in physics. I&#x27;ve taken 1 algorithms course in my life, and that was over 10 years ago.<p>So she asks me, &quot;How much of your time to I spend writing code?&quot; I tell her, maybe 10%-20%. And then she jumps right into asking algorithm complexity questions and generic trivia: what is the average run time of quicksort, what is 356 in binary, estimate 2^20, etc. I was getting some of them right, some of them wrong, but eventually I had to stop her and say &quot;Look, I don&#x27;t really know what is going on right now. You told me you were contacting me based on my experience, but now you&#x27;re asking questions that don&#x27;t have anything to do with what I do. It sounds like the role you&#x27;re trying to fill doesn&#x27;t align well with my experience.&quot; That was pretty much the end of the conversation.<p>It&#x27;s not even that I feel like I shouldn&#x27;t get vetted. I should! But do it based on what I know. Ask me linear algebra trivia, or how robotics algorithms work and their time complexity, or ask me about topology or statistics or machine learning. Why are you grilling me on sorting algorithms?<p>I think if it works anywhere, it&#x27;s going to be at smaller shops, where they don&#x27;t have a line of candidates stretching around the block.