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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?

#81

Post by david38 »

porridgeraisin wrote: post #52
Aurornis wrote: post #17

Earlier 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…

Yeah, here in India people love choosing leetcode hards for when they come to a college and everyone in the college applies to them. Considering how big colleges are here, they just care about the filter rate of the test. Leetcode hards filter the candidate set down to a size that they can realistically interview, and so they continue choosing that. Mediums sometimes let through too many people. In normal hiring, i.e…

This is awful. It weeds out the people who are creative and love to code in favor of those who will memorize answers to get into a certain company.

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

#82

Post by spacemadness »

timr wrote: post #41
Aurornis wrote: post #17

Earlier 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…

Or interviewers pretending they could answer the question. The great absurdity is that interviewers find a problem, work it out for themselves with unlimited time or just find the answer, then ask it expecting someone to answer it cold. It’s a complete farce. If the world was fair, and we actually thought these problems were useful, you’d be able to turn around and ask the interviewer an equally hard question and expect them to solve it to know you’re working with quality people. Chances are they would fail.

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

#83

Post by JohnBooty »

A lot of companies still don't use Leetcode, at least in my experience, so I don't think we need to wonder too hard!

Change hasn't been too drastic since I entered the business in the late 1990s.

Salaries used to be less inflated, so hiring interviews were a little more lax, because hiring a $60K/yr developer is much lower stakes than a $150K/yr developer.

You were also competing against fewer candidates. "Back in the day" before WFH they might have had 10 or 20 applicants instead of 200 or 2000. So there was less automation and more human factor.

There were often still coding exercises. Your portfolio/work history mattered, as it does today.

I think there was much less awareness of "software engineering" (sustainable, scalable processes like source control, CI/CD, etc) as opposed to like, "just hire a guy who is smart and writes code good."

A lot of programming jobs at smaller shops were really kind of like hybrid sysadmin/coding jobs. You might also be fixing peoples' printer drivers and shit, in addition to coding reports and data imports or whatever.

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

#84

Post by timr »

Aurornis wrote: post #77
timr wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I didn't quit working in tech in 2017. People are still using them -- I still see and hear interview questions -- I'm just not the one being interviewed.

I don't know how "rare" it is across an entire industry...but then again, no one does. You're asserting something you cannot possibly know.

> 2017 was a long time ago in industry terms.

Oh, stop it.

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

#85

Post by subharmonicon »

hcfman wrote: post #18
subharmonicon wrote: post #16

In the 90’s when I was at Microsoft it was common for people to ask brain teasers and algorithm questions and expect people to be able to reason through the problems even if they walked in not knowing the particular algorithm or data structures involved. The interview was graded more on your thought process and ability to make forward progress with hints and less on getting to a correct answer in 25 minutes. People w…

Here’s an idea. What about using a computer, causes that’s what you are going to be doing. I’m just bitching about having to code a binary search using a white board at Google when I had previously written a search engine and indexed two country’s by a man who wears a cowboy hat to work. (To be fair it was a nice hat) I didn’t get the job, they claimed not good enough at coding, wtf! Well f*k them then.

I’m totally on board with what you’re saying.

Unfortunately a lot of tech is far too biased towards a small set of learnable skills that are sometimes hard to demonstrate in an interview setting, and the result is that a lot of good people don’t get offers for jobs that they could totally crush in.

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

#86

Post by ngc248 »

jghn wrote: post #50
jaredsohn wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ah the crossing the river puzzle, got that during my campus interviews.

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

#87

Post by whitehexagon »

30 years of freelancing and most interviews (Europe) have just been conversations, first with business, and then with a couple techie team members. Which always felt like more of a 'does he fit in' type approach.

The business side along the lines of 'what value can you add', and the technical side was more about describing problems you had discovered, communicated about, fixed, and details about the methodology, or APIs involved.

I rejected interview requests with google et al knowing of the time wasting LC approach. I think most developers are there to solve real world business problems, not rewrite an OS, although actually that is currently my hobby project :)

With AI assist, the focus on solving business problems comes back to the forefront, and the LC can be done by the AInt so bad coder. Or I think it was mentioned here recently that coders will soon be relegated to AI reviewers, what a horrible thought.

In summary ;) I think I'd be interviewing programmers focusing more based on business domain knowledge at this point.

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

#88

Post by b20000 »

mianos wrote: post #38
b20000 wrote: post #11

[flagged]

Too bad you prefaced this with 'Americans'. The rest is probably true. I feel some people love the feeling of power when they are interviewing someone. If someone can not answer my trick question I want to know why not and what question can they answer that I don't know. I am looking for people better than me and the inability not to answer my favourite question may not mean they are not better. The ability to answer…

Yeah, I shouldn't have written that. The comment comes from a place of frustration with the interview process and my perceived cultural differences with how people who grew up in the US interview candidates and test whether they are a fraud or a bullshitter VS how people from other backgrounds interview. Too late to remove the comment now. My mistake.

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

#89

Post by tamishungry »

groby_b wrote: post #9

Nope. No pseudo code. Definitely lots of whiteboarding. Lots of "recall arcane facts". (Like "Why did our counter stop counting up at 16M" - the answer being "because you used float for a counter, what's wrong with you") And definitely lots of algorithmic questions. Better questions than leetcode, though, because they were usually grounded in an actual problem the interviewer had.

M1 here. I used to have those "actual problem" questions for my interviewee, but my parent company's HR said we'd have to stick to questions that would yield better "yes/no" on a candidate than "how they think". In the end we were forced to use LC as a source for questions.

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

#90

Post by groby_b »

tamishungry wrote: post #89
groby_b wrote: post #9

Nope. No pseudo code. Definitely lots of whiteboarding. Lots of "recall arcane facts". (Like "Why did our counter stop counting up at 16M" - the answer being "because you used float for a counter, what's wrong with you") And definitely lots of algorithmic questions. Better questions than leetcode, though, because they were usually grounded in an actual problem the interviewer had.

M1 here. I used to have those "actual problem" questions for my interviewee, but my parent company's HR said we'd have to stick to questions that would yield better "yes/no" on a candidate than "how they think". In the end we were forced to use LC as a source for questions.

Sigh. I am sorry to hear that. And not surprised.

(You can approach "how they think" as a question with strict rubrics fwiw, but it's a somewhat uphill battle. And not one you can win as an M1, usually)

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