Years of experience are not created equal. There are far fewer who can actually solve them but don’t want to than those who just can’t. If you spent the last 10 years just ossifying then you might be great in your current role but realistically you’re terrible at building new things.

While providing a syntactically correct, optimal solution to a given problem is important (this was reiterated many times during my recent interview process at a FAANG), it is also important to be able to demonstrate the ability to synthesize an approach to solving a problem to which you don't already know the answer. That is, how to solve a problem.

These questions, while certainly aimed at identifying core competency areas, are also an opportunity for the candidate to demonstrate an aptitude for problem solving. Nobody really cares "how many piano tuners operate in Seattle". What they care about is, given that kind of question, how a candidate responds. You might be surprised by the number of people totally unable to even generate a reasonable estimate:

- How many people live in Seattle? - What percentage have pianos? - How often does a piano need tuning? - How long does it take to tune a piano? - How many pianos can be tuned per work day (given commuting time)? - etc.. driving towards a number.

Did the candidate attack the problem and even attempt to solve it? Did they use metrics? The list goes on... Most LC-style questions (save the "aha! moment" ones) have a similar impetus, but are also much more practical and efficient because they test for many things at once.

And if I'm being honest... most FAANGs aren't looking for engineers that require quiet and time to solve problems. They are looking for elite engineers who can write a solution nearly as fast as the problem is presented (I'm obviously exaggerating a little bit here). The difficulty of the questions presented to me (6 technical interviews) were what I consider semi-trivial. I was able to describe the solution-space within seconds of reading the prompt and code an optimal solution nearly as fast as I could type in all cases. It honestly made me wonder about how poorly the average programmer must perform such that these were the questions they needed to evaluate my potential.

Another commenter posted this article [0] about the interviewing philosophy back in the early '00s. I found it very enlightening, and reassuringly, while reading through it I knew the answer to nearly every question (and could expand upon the topics) just off the top of my head. I'm not trying to sound arrogant here but the idea that a FAANG, who pays top-dollar for engineers, would settle for "10 years experience" as a suitable replacement for "demonstrates ability" is what's absurd. A false positive is way more costly than a false negative.

[0] https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-pho...