31–40 of 114 posts
Hot take: these interesting, contained problems that you really can solve on your own are a finite resource, and every time you read the solution to one you permanently deplete that resource for yourself.
I’m currently preparing for interviews myself, so having access to high-quality, free resources like this is incredibly helpful. The AI interviewer feature, in particular, looks like it will be very useful for me. Thanks again to the author for making these resources available!
Hot take: these interesting, contained problems that you really can solve on your own are a finite resource, and every time you read the solution to one you permanently deplete that resource for yourself.
Thank you for this. Some people are critical of coding tests but I do this there is a point: namely to weed out people who can't code. Am I the only one that interviewed people with lengthy resumes full of programming experience and when I asked them to do a simple programming exercise they fell flat on their face? I've seen experience in C, gave them take home two hour exam and they couldn't even get anything to com…
Cracking the Code Interview is a great book and excellent for practice and brushing up. But I have found leet-code questions terrible for actually interviewing candidates. A lot of them boil down to whether the candidate knows the specific trick or can regurgitate the memorized solution. (Maybe I am just bitter because I have more than once bombed a leet-code interview myself) I interview a lot of people and my go-to…
Cracking the Code Interview is a great book and excellent for practice and brushing up. But I have found leet-code questions terrible for actually interviewing candidates. A lot of them boil down to whether the candidate knows the specific trick or can regurgitate the memorized solution. (Maybe I am just bitter because I have more than once bombed a leet-code interview myself) I interview a lot of people and my go-to…
People keep saying this, but no one ever shares any meaningful data to make their case. Tech companies have been using Leetcode-style interviews to hire programmers for decades, and have grown in value from nothing to trillions of dollars in that time. The industry as a whole is worth tens of trillions, and the software these fake Leetcode programmers have built has eaten the world. Large companies have all spent bil…
Sure, some interviews are pretty hard and some algorithms/data structures are not as common on the job. But given a complex enough system, you'll run into lots of situations where having this foundation will pay off. I mean, it's just computer science.
That's the thing about software engineering. You can get a lot done without knowing the foundational stuff. But then you're just a blunt instrument. Everything looks like a nail to a hammer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People keep saying this, but no one ever shares any meaningful data to make their case. Tech companies have been using Leetcode-style interviews to hire programmers for decades, and have grown in value from nothing to trillions of dollars in that time. The industry as a whole is worth tens of trillions, and the software these fake Leetcode programmers have built has eaten the world. Large companies have all spent bil…
I used to agree with the anti-Leetcode sentiment like the OP, but changed my tune fairly quickly once I started doing actual production-grade software engineering that goes beyond just simple CRUD and realized the things that Leetcode tests are applicable everywhere. It just kinda clicked one day for me and I started passing Leetcode assessments. Sure, some interviews are pretty hard and some algorithms/data structur…
Honestly it's 30-45 minutes where you can establish whether the person can code, and whether they have the basic foundational knowledge to crack efficiency problems is pretty hard to beat.
Whilst there's probably diminishing returns on making the actual challenge more and more difficult, the general concept is a lot fairer than the majority of other interview types I've had thrown at me. ( Usually something they've solved internally, where they expect you to regurgitate the same answers without the same context )
Cracking the Code Interview is a great book and excellent for practice and brushing up. But I have found leet-code questions terrible for actually interviewing candidates. A lot of them boil down to whether the candidate knows the specific trick or can regurgitate the memorized solution. (Maybe I am just bitter because I have more than once bombed a leet-code interview myself) I interview a lot of people and my go-to…
1. Raw mental horsepower
2. The ability to just repeatedly do focused learning, aka just grinding
And sure, it probably does favor #2 these days - but that is a critically important skill. You can trade one for the other, but everybody has some amount of both, and these questions figure out, roughly, your computed aggregate score of these.
They have a very high false negative rate, but an exceptionally low false positive rate for a 60 minute interview, so it works very well in companies with large interview candidate pipelines.
Cracking the Code Interview is a great book and excellent for practice and brushing up. But I have found leet-code questions terrible for actually interviewing candidates. A lot of them boil down to whether the candidate knows the specific trick or can regurgitate the memorized solution. (Maybe I am just bitter because I have more than once bombed a leet-code interview myself) I interview a lot of people and my go-to…
The whole thing is broken.