About that “technical” interview

If, in an engineering manager interview, you ask me to do anything with a binary tree I’ll probably fail it on the spot.

I didn’t graduate with a CS degree and I’ve never been all that interested in the low-level mechanics of programming or languages. But I do enjoy building things and am thankful for all the frameworks, standard libs, and abstractions built on top of languages that exist to make building apps pleasant.

My entire career has been building products and figuring things out as I go. Over time I’ve built up my skills through experimentation and learning from folks who are better than me in practical, real world situations.

In my 20+ years, I don’t think I’ve ever once had to reverse a binary tree or write an extremely complex algorithm, much less have to do it conversationally or on a whiteboard. If I did, it was by accident or because an actual feature required it. But I never sat around and wrote theoretical code with no implementation need. Maybe I’m just lucky or maybe the things I’ve worked on haven’t been terribly complex, but it’s the truth.

I get that companies need weed out questions and some standard of measurement for technical competency, but I firmly believe that conceptual, low-level programming questions are never going to be a valid measure of a good engineer much less a good engineering manager.

Originally posted on LinkedIn.