I used to interview for a big company, and I could tell some candidates already knew the questions, but I'm a bad interviewer myself as I tend to rate most candidates as 7+/10, I very rarely found coding-illiterate candidates.
When I detected the candidate knew the questions, I'd switch order, introduce new questions I didn't usually ask.
The interview we did was quite extensive on the java basics and if the candidate somehow managed to learn all that stuff by knowing the questions, that was a pretty good sign anyway.
It was just this one time I found a candidate who aced every question I asked, even OOP, Design Patterns, I made up on the spot a code-design challenge, the guy suddenly was not so brilliant, but still managed to hold his own and I didn't penalize him for my impression that he knew the questions, he was way better than the usual candidate anyway.
Perhaps the stakes were not so high as in the USA, but I can say I've never found someone who would have failed without knowing the questions in advance; I did fail people who were trying to cheat on the phone interview, but those were rare cases.
My impression is technical interviews just filter programming-illiterate programmers and people who don't give a f#ck -- as a general rule.
There's also the 30% of cases where the interview is made up to show the candidate he's not really all that senior as he thinks and to lowball his salary request.
And some companies have very high technical interview standards because of some cultural inferiority complex (we are just like Google, you see...).
When I detected the candidate knew the questions, I'd switch order, introduce new questions I didn't usually ask.
The interview we did was quite extensive on the java basics and if the candidate somehow managed to learn all that stuff by knowing the questions, that was a pretty good sign anyway.
It was just this one time I found a candidate who aced every question I asked, even OOP, Design Patterns, I made up on the spot a code-design challenge, the guy suddenly was not so brilliant, but still managed to hold his own and I didn't penalize him for my impression that he knew the questions, he was way better than the usual candidate anyway.
Perhaps the stakes were not so high as in the USA, but I can say I've never found someone who would have failed without knowing the questions in advance; I did fail people who were trying to cheat on the phone interview, but those were rare cases.
My impression is technical interviews just filter programming-illiterate programmers and people who don't give a f#ck -- as a general rule. There's also the 30% of cases where the interview is made up to show the candidate he's not really all that senior as he thinks and to lowball his salary request. And some companies have very high technical interview standards because of some cultural inferiority complex (we are just like Google, you see...).