As a recruiter, I find it increasingly hard to recruit good software developers, due to the fact that it has become very easy to simply study for a job interview by reading any of those 14020 job interview questions for the software developer! books that are immensely popular these days.
It's gotten to the point where you pretty much can't ask a question without the applicant already having pre-studied at least a version of that same task and hence knows, roughly, what the solution is.
Now, this would of course not be a problem if knowledge of those problems is what we are looking for ... except, that isn't what we are looking for. Nobody cares if you know how to apply quicksort to some contrived, made-up example. The point isn't that you know how to solve those problems, the point is that you can figure it out. It's problem-solvers that we want, not problem-memorizers.
Because, once you actually get the job, you'll most likely never run into any of those problems from the job interview book again, so it's not your ability to memorize their solutions that matters,matters; it's your ability to come up with a solution on the spot that is valuable. And yet, that is no longer testable, due to all these memorizers that read interview questions over and over.
How do we fix this issue? Because I am frankly tired of hiring promising software developers who answer each question perfectly in job interview questions, and then when you actually see them code in a real-world situation, you realize how little they actually know.
