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Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?
71–80 of 91 posts
Re: Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
The manhole cover thing was always confusing for me, as where I'm from manholes are all square.
Wonder if people where you're from run into problems where the manhole covers tip onto their diagonal and fall in (since that's the answer I memorized and I think is known as the predominant reason.)
Isn't actual reason that round shapes handle pressure better. So in the end it is about shape of the hole not the cover. As holes in ground are not square.
Then again I think here we have both, square and round. Square ones are more for rain runoff on sides of roads. Where as anything in middle of road are round usually with no grating and some rain water run off locations are also round for access again.
Re: Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?
#73Leetcode is significantly overrepresented on HN. Leetcode is barely a thing across most of the world. Mid-career dev jobs in non-FAANG (and their orbiting startups) organisations don't expect people to spend their time studying for leetcode interviews. Leet is definitely not a thing in other industries - you don't interview for, say, a logistics co-ordinator, by making them study and regurgitate logistics theory.
The short answer to your question, and to try and not start up another HN thread on how good or bad differing interviewing techniques are, is that we did things similar to how most recruiters and hiring managers are still doing it across the world. I think the big difference is more around getting to the first interview. Technology means that there are more applicants, automation of filtering (bad), and remote interviews than there used to be in the past. The funnels to get candidates may have changed, but in my experience, once in the final stretch things are pretty much the same as they have always been.
Re: Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?
#74For 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…
I do the same. The last hiring I did, I sent them a homework assignment that shouldn't take more than an hour. Then, we started talking about it. I asked to explain what and why was done. The started expanding into the sides areas of the solution. Then zoomed out and we discussed what would be the implications of doing x,y,z in a wider context of the system. The natural flow of the conversation does a couple of things: their social skills and how they approach unknown situations. I've hear plenty of 'I don't know' which was absolutely fine and much better than some fake confidence.
Re: Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?
#75Earlier 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.
But the brain teaser is also just an exercise in trying to get a discussion going. Okay so how could I possibly memorise the volume of a 747 and a ping pong ball, and even if you give me that it's a decent amount of complexity to calculate. But are we accounting for their comfort and making sure they all have TV screens? Do we have to account for FAA regulations? Is it okay if some of the ping pong balls get damaged…
This was always the claim, yes.
And much like how these days people complain about getting rejected for slipping up on a leetcode problem in a minor way, back then there were plenty of stories of interviewers treating these problems as a black & white problem where you were expected to just know the answer.
To be clear, the problem wasn't the question. It was the interviewer asking the question.
Re: Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?
#76"What have you done?"
"How did you do it?"
"What problems did you encounter?"
"How did you solve them?"
It's not hard to recognize an impostor.
Re: Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> last time I interviewed for IC jobs, which was around 2017.
2017 was a long time ago in industry terms. The FizzBuzz article came out in 2007, your interviews were 10 years after that, and we’re now 7 years after that.
Things have changed a lot. It’s rare to encounter actual LC Hard problems in most interview loops. Most of the reports of LC Hards turn out to be Mediums upon closer examination. The current trend is for people to call anything a “hard” if they couldn’t get it, not necessarily because it came from an LC hard problem.
Re: Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
this is what i heard places like google asked.questions like how many marbles could fill an airplane. idk if it was just like urban legends though.
I'm pretty sure Google published a list of such questions themselves at some point. But as I remember it, they were always presented as "show you can think" not "know the answer".
That's how how leet code questions are presented now hah
Re: Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?
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Re: Ask HN: What were interviews like before Leetcode?
#80We 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.
So Fermi problems are considered brain-teasers? We considered those especially useful for PMs.