My friend gave an interview yesterday. I was shocked by the process.
No DSA. No system design. No LLD. Not even HR screening. 😅
They handed him a problem statement and a small repository and said: “Find the bugs. The clock is running.”
The bugs could be:
- Functional: wrong output or missing validation
- Non-functional: a query that dies at scale
- Architectural: a pattern or design that should be reconsidered
The hard part wasn’t finding bugs. It was deciding which ones to find first.
I keep thinking about what that round actually tests:
- Can you build a mental model of code you didn’t write?
- Can you tell a real bug from a design choice you simply wouldn’t have made?
- Can you say “this bug is fine for now; this one is not” and defend why?
Writing code got very cheap this year. Reading it didn’t.
So, of course, interviews are drifting there. The code exists, but the context is missing.
I don’t think this replaces DSA rounds. But for senior roles, this skill is increasingly required.