By the end of it, I decided I should just apply for Junior positions. I also got the advice that I have to take a couple months off to study for them. So that's what I did. (Not easy to do when you have mortgage to pay and a family to feed)
.. or spend time with. What's grating about the interviews you describe, where it's comp sci 101 versus experience, is that it punishes people who have years of experience in the field and established lives outside of work. Meanwhile, the 25 year olds comp-sci grads have it fresh in their minds, so appear more qualified.
25 yr old fresh Comp-Sci grads are way cheaper to employ than a 40yr old with 15 yrs experience. I see these types of interviews and hirings as straight up Ageism and cost cutting measures, without actually having to say 'Only college grads apply'.
I've seen well qualified candidates turned down by ageism. At a prior company, I was in a group interviewing a guy, and a manager said, after his second interview, "I just didnt see the passion." It's sad but true in tech.
Counterpoint: if you've spent years programming without somehow using the fundamentals often enough to have them deeply ingrained into your psyche, maybe your experience isn't a fit?
Some companies don't want a decade of writing crud apps.
Which is totally fine. But when that company's main product _is_ a CRUD app.... I don't want think these inverting a binary tree questions are very useful. If your company actually _does_ do that, then I totally agree, a web-designer with some Rails experience, is probably not the right fit.
Counterpoint: If you find you're having to implement "the fundamentals" that often, maybe you aren't a good fit for an engineering position.
Not every company wants someone who views every problem as a nail to hit with a CS[1-4]01 hammer.
There are positions where novel applications of known algorithms are required for which no existing implementation exists and there are research positions for generating new algorithms. These positions together comprise a tiny fraction of intellectually challenging software development (and an even smaller fraction when your pejorative "CRUD" applications are considered). I'd guess outside of these two contexts and school the need to understand "the fundamentals" well enough to have them "deeply ingrained" is smaller still.
Counter-counterpoint: here's a bucket of sand, some ore, and a furnace. Make a processor. Be sure to explain your thought process as you go!
(after all, this is "fundamentals", right?)
The choice of which "fundamentals" to test on is entirely in the hands of the interviewer, and for sake of ease seems to have converged on pop-quiz-style problems which do not test knowledge of "fundamentals" but instead test ability to snap-recall things that -- let's be honest -- don't get directly used a lot in day-to-day programming. How many working programmers honestly write graph or tree structures from scratch on a daily basis? I don't. If I need something basic I use a library -- its implementation is likely to be more correct and more robust than anything I'm likely to produce quickly from scratch.
Which means this approach biases against people with experience of day-to-day programming, and in favor of inexperienced recent college graduates who've been regurgitating this information in exams. Which in turn means it's achieving the opposite of what you claim it's meant to achieve. I don't see how that's defensible, but for some reason people chant FUNDAMENTALS! FUNDAMENTALS! FUNDAMENTALS! Ballmer-style whenever the topic comes up.
.. or spend time with. What's grating about the interviews you describe, where it's comp sci 101 versus experience, is that it punishes people who have years of experience in the field and established lives outside of work. Meanwhile, the 25 year olds comp-sci grads have it fresh in their minds, so appear more qualified.