Beyond Factorials: What Interview Questions Reveal About Engineering Culture

Beyond Factorials: What Interview Questions Reveal About Engineering Culture

Technical interviews are meant to surface capability. Yet too often, they lean on questions that belong to a different era — puzzles where success depends on recalling textbook exercises.

Take the classic example: “Write a factorial function recursively.” Once, this tested understanding of recursion. Today, it is not just low-signal. It is obsolete.

Why “Trivial” Has Changed

We live in an era of AI-assisted engineering. Any trivial pattern — recursion, sorting, boilerplate transforms — can be produced in seconds by a code assistant. Memory is no longer the scarce resource.

What matters now is:

  • Knowing what tools to use, and why.
  • Recognising when recursion introduces overhead or stack risk.
  • Designing contracts and architectures so recursion is rarely needed in frontend code.

Asking someone to hand-write recursion as a proxy for competence ignores modern reality. The real test is understanding trade-offs — not reproducing what AI already generates.

Where Recursion Belongs (and Where It Doesn’t)

In frontend engineering, recursion has narrow, valid uses: rendering trees, traversing nested structures, recursive components. Beyond that, it is usually a design smell.

In enterprise systems, heavy recursion in the UI often means complexity wasn’t solved upstream. Mature teams simplify data at the API layer and deliver clean view-models for lean rendering.

The Interview as a Diagnostic

Interview questions are not neutral. They signal the level of engineering maturity inside the organisation.

  • If the test is a textbook puzzle, the culture is likely checkbox-driven.
  • If the test explores architecture, performance, and trade-offs, the culture values judgment.

In today’s environment, asking for factorial recursion is a missed opportunity to assess what actually matters: the ability to design, reason, and apply judgment where trivial code is no longer scarce.

Closing Thought

Every interview question makes a statement. In an age where AI can write recursion in milliseconds, strong engineers distinguish themselves not by memorising patterns but by knowing what to use, when to use it, and why.

The future of engineering interviews should reflect that reality.