Other than in house tech support, or some systems design work for AWS, I struggle to think of many situations in which "Explain the purpose and functionality of the Northbridge on a motherboard / in a CPU" would serve any practical purpose whatsoever. Hell, I've lost track of the number of custom PC builds I've made, BIOS tweaks and I still had to research this.

I don't think it's as bad of a format if you just change the premise to a remote hire or something. You need to do a lot more communicating. But there is really no way to be totally sure about someone.

I also find it mildly insulting that essentially i'm interviewing for a job I don't know i'm going to have, as if I had no choice in what I do, or my choice was irrelevant. If I get hired for a Perl job, don't put me on a Java team, because I hate Java. They could also just skip certain interviews by asking if I have any interest in X team in the future, or if I have any experience with it.

I will say I did appreciate and enjoy my own experience with Amazon - two phone interviews, possibly some code sample, and an in-person. Really nice people. Just an unfortunate waste of time, especially for the interviewers.

> If they hire you because you know Angular but fuck all otherwise, they're screwing over the team you're going to be on in two years who need someone that can learn C socket programming ASAP.

That's even more fucked up. It really shows that they view all developers as interchangeable cogs.