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Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?

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Re: Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?

#41

Post by timr »

Aurornis wrote: post #17
timr wrote: post #8

We had algorithm questions, but they weren't absurd. Whereas you'll routinely run into leetcode "hard" questions in interviews now -- which should be a dead giveaway that the candidate has memorized the answer -- back then you'd maybe get one question that peaked out at about medium. That's about the practical limit for a competent (but exceptional) mortal who hasn't simply memorized a book of trivia. (And yes, we di…

> Whereas you'll routinely run into leetcode "hard" questions in interviews now Where are you seeing LC hard questions? I’m in a fairly big Slack where people have been comparing notes on interviews for years. The number of people who actually get LC hard problems is extremely small. A lot of people will claim they got LC hards immediately after an interview when they couldn’t solve them, but when you ask them to des…

I personally hit them the last time I interviewed for IC jobs, which was around 2017.

In fact, I had a rather hilarious circuit where one interview hit me with a leetcode hard that I couldn't solve, and I worked out the answer when I got home. Later, I went to another interview that asked me the same question. They thought I was a genius.

I remember a fad that year was asking questions about doing depth-first search in 2D tensors. Once you learned that core trick well (mainly about handling the boundary conditions and traversals without messy code, which takes practice), about 80% of interview questions opened up to you. It was crazy how many companies were asking variations on that core question. So you'd do a few interviews naïve, bomb them, figure out the answers for the fads of the day, and be well-prepared by about your 3rd or 4th go-round.

Idiocy, all of it. Even leetcode medium is too much to be pushing for a correct answer in an interview [1]. It's Kabuki theater for engineers, where the interviewee is pretending not to have memorized the answer, the interviewer is pretending that the interviewee hasn't memorized the answer, and everyone is pretending that this is a "signal" that matters.

[1] Assuming that they haven't seen the question, of course. I will say that a question of that difficulty level can be useful to push someone to their limits for other reasons. But these days, it's mostly just a pass/fail screen, and you do the leetcode medium perfectly while tapdancing backwards, or you don't move to the next round.

Re: Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?

#42

Post by muzani »

jasonpeacock wrote: post #26
timr wrote: post #8

We had algorithm questions, but they weren't absurd. Whereas you'll routinely run into leetcode "hard" questions in interviews now -- which should be a dead giveaway that the candidate has memorized the answer -- back then you'd maybe get one question that peaked out at about medium. That's about the practical limit for a competent (but exceptional) mortal who hasn't simply memorized a book of trivia. (And yes, we di…

I use a fizzbuzz-level question in my phonescreens for all levels of SDEs, and about 1/2 fail to solve it (from a wide range of experience, I've given up trying to predict who will fail). The other 1/2 quickly solve it and we move on to better stuff.

Yeah, similar. If you're experienced enough, fizzbuzz is just so trivial enough that you can do it before the application. Hell, just tell them to copy paste the answer. Someone inadvertently pastes the wrong programming language for it too, which suggests they're either not reading the question or not comfortable with the language they're interviewing for.

Re: Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?

#44

Post by jaredsohn »

jghn wrote: post #28
PlunderBunny wrote: post #22

We would give interviewees a little sample of code (e.g, a minimal string copy function using a loop in C) and ask how they would make it better, without defining what better meant. Some developers would try to optimise it, others would point out the bad variable names and lack of documentation, or talk about unit tests. It was a starting point for a discussion.

Not really. Some places did that sure. And some places do that now. But the cargo cutled nonsense before leetcode were the brain teasers. "How many ping pong balls can fit into a 747?". Also nonsense.

This book was about puzzle interview questions from Microsoft in the early 2000s: https://www.amazon.com/How-Would-Move-Mount-Fuji/dp/03167784...

Also, a famous question around that time was 'why are manhole covers round?'. (Thought there was a book from that era with that name but not seeing it; only found a newer book.)

Remember doing interview prep at the time by trying to memorize the answers to a bunch of these puzzles. Leetcode is useful in comparison to that. I had an interview once where the interviewer could tell I knew these and he was asking me to tell him about others I knew about.

Re: Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?

#45

Post by muzani »

Smart and gets things done, by Joel Spolsky: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...

Still a great read. Base idea is that they're smart enough to solve problems and they get things done and don't just blab about ideas which they won't implement. So they'd write code to prove they can get things done.

Brainteasers were okay, but bad at testing the latter. This somehow evolved into Leetcode culture or take home assignments.

Re: Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?

#46

Post by jghn »

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote: post #35
jghn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Some places did that sure. And some places do that now. But the cargo cutled nonsense before leetcode were the brain teasers. "How many ping pong balls can fit into a 747?". Also nonsense.

It depends where you live and apply. In France I never had whiteboards, leeetcode, or psychological puzzles. It has always been “let’s talk for an hour about this specific language that we use so you can prove you’re a good fit.”

Agree. I'm talking about the US. Much like today where the belief that 100% of the companies do leetcode, 20 years ago the belief was that 100% of the companies did brain teasers.

Neither are true. And that was my real point. There was still the annoying cargo culled crap that way too mnay companies used, but back then, just like today, plenty of companies don't do this. And that's your point.

EDIT: Don't get me wrong. It's annoying as fuck how many companies interview this way. It's just not as ubiquitous as HN leads on

Re: Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?

#47

Post by dbjacobs »

In the eighties it was completely nonstandardized and depended heavily on each person you talked with. You would typically visit with a company for the day while they passed you around from person to person. One might have you code something on a whiteboard. Another might ask you a brain teaser. Someone would go through the experience on your resume. And another might ask you something like "how would you figure out the number of pixels needed to make this wall indistinguishable from a picture (i.e., retina display)" just to see how you think. Lunch was often where team fit was assessed.

Re: Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?

#48

Post by vaylian »

awill88 wrote: post #40

Leetcode? I find it interesting that there’s an assumption that if you exist in this world as a professional software engineer and are successful by all reasonable measures that it somehow predisposes an exposure with leetcode. I’ve never used it for interviews not because I put energy to avoid it, but because I don’t think it’s all that popular, or maybe I just don’t interview often enough. If I want a new job I wai…

> An interview is and will always be a balance of your technical skill and your ability to present your work and deal with timely feedback. That’s it.

That's the ideal case. However, reality can be very different. Some companies reach for leetcode-style questions because they don't have a clue how to do the interview process the way you describe it.

> What, is it that if you’re not using it today then you’re somehow “behind”?

That is not something you get to decide. The hiring manager will judge you if you are behind if you can't answer leetcode-style questions. This is not a question of knowledge, but a question of power.

Re: Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?

#49

Post by invalidator »

For a couple decades now, the way I have interviewed people is to ask a simple, very-high-level question, then repeatedly asking either "So how does it do that?" (drill down), or "What happens next?" (back out).

For instance: What does 'printf("hello, world\n");' do? Obviously, it prints something, but how does it do that? Pretty quickly you're talking about includes, macros, libc, linking, machine code, system calls... One question can easily fill an entire interview slot.

The fun thing is there's no "right" answer. Nobody is expected to know everything about how software works, but everyone is expected to know something. This format gives the interviewee the opportunity to show off what they know best, and the interviewer gets to pry in to see how deeply they know it.

I'm a low-level guy so that's the direction I tend to probe. Usually someone else asks a similarly abstract high-level question. One of my favorites is: "Design a parking garage". Again, there's no right answer. It's a prompt for the candidate to show what they know. Very quickly they're coming up with functions and class hierarchies and/or data structures for vehicles, spaces, turnstiles, payment kiosks, figuring out how to pass them around, etc. The interviewer has plenty of opportunities to pry into design tradeoffs, add complications, and so on.

The grand idea is to have a deep conceptual discussion instead of just seeing if they can write a few lines of code. This also demonstrates how well they can communicate. The catch is you have to be sure they give some actual concrete answers in a few places, and aren't just fast talkers.

Re: Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?

#50

Post by jghn »

jaredsohn wrote: post #44
jghn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Some places did that sure. And some places do that now. But the cargo cutled nonsense before leetcode were the brain teasers. "How many ping pong balls can fit into a 747?". Also nonsense.

This book was about puzzle interview questions from Microsoft in the early 2000s: https://www.amazon.com/How-Would-Move-Mount-Fuji/dp/03167784... Also, a famous question around that time was 'why are manhole covers round?'. (Thought there was a book from that era with that name but not seeing it; only found a newer book.) Remember doing interview prep at the time by trying to memorize the answers to a bunch of these…

"Remember doing interview prep at the time by trying to memorize the answers to a bunch of these puzzles. "

I remember bumping into a friend on the subway, he was coming back from an interview. We were trying to work out some cockamamie puzzle involving barnyard animals crossing the river. He felt he got it right, but one of the interviewers grilled him.

When I got home I googled the problem and found out there was a generally accepted answer that was wrong. And that's what the interviewer was pushing. My friend had arrived at the correct answer.

And he didn't get the job.

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