Keeping my face straight as I ask them why are they asking me DS&A questions for a backend development job in which damn near everything will be taken care of by a package or a special config inside of something like spring boot or netcore and where damn near most of my requests will be of the form "can thou make tis button LARGER?"

Then watching their sad faces as I terminate the interview because I don't play those fucking games for web development jobs.

????

You don't think SOME baseline DS&A knowledge has relevance to virtually any development job? I mean, I'm not gonna ask you a bunch of in-depth shit for a web dev job because you're right, it's not especially relevant... but for example, can you tell me the difference between a Set and a Map? Can you tell me what data structure the DOM is and explain why it's that and not something else? Because those are pretty basic DS&A questions in my book, and I WOULD absolutely expect any developer to be able to answer them (well, the second one only if it's a front-end web dev position, obviously). If you literally accept NO DS&A questions in an interview, then you're artificially limiting your opportunities. But if what you really mean is "don't ask me all sorts of wacky shit that we both know I'll NEVER use, even conceptually, on the job" then yeah, okay, I'm on the same page. I don't care if you can invert a binary tree, but you gotta know SOMETHING, right?

@fzammetti yes, I expect a candidate to. But I also expect an interview to make more sense for what comes at hand in terms of their job. I did not ask any of my employees any DS&A questions. They all perform wonderfully, I can leave the office and task them with something and it will get done.

As someone whose voice actually matters when hiring, shit like DS&A is retarded. I need people that can lead, not solve the easiest way on an algo problem.

It has worked great for years now, as a hiring manager. Other than that, no one gives a shit about it, it is pointless, specially in web development, I care more about the intricacies of a web framework, i am not going to X someone out because they know DS&A over someone that knows say Laravel or spring boot. Shit is useless, we don't work on theory, but on products being pushed to the customer. A better question would deal with that.

@AleCx04 Most of those skills are easy to transfer as well. I think the issue with theory questions is that you end up studying for the interview. Even if you use the algo or struct often you just forget the name.

@fzammetti No, really, what datastructure _is_ the DOM? I don't mean what structure do the html, body, head, div and p tags comprise, I mean the whole thing, all features you'd expect a good frontend dev to at least be aware of.

@lorentz I wouldn't be looking for anything too in-depth. As long as you can tell me it's a tree, that's probably all I need to hear in terms of strructure. That said, I expect any web developer to know basic things like getElementById()... I have literally asked candidates "let's say you have a div that you want to insert content into, and you know it's ID, how do you get a reference to it in JS using that ID?" and I get blank stares. I mean, there's GOTTA be a baseline of knowledge, and that for me is it (I'll even let it slide if they give me a jQuery-centric answer or something like that, which has happened a few times). Not sure if that answers your question?