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Show HN: AlgoDrill – Interactive drills to stop forgetting LeetCode patterns
71–80 of 118 posts
Re: Show HN: AlgoDrill – Interactive drills to stop forgetting LeetCode patterns
#72I feel like this is a bit backwards. It seems to be an improvement over just grinding LeetCode, but I'd never work for a company expecting me to spit out LeetCode solutions quickly (recall). If they give me a LeetCode style problem and want to see how I approach this, what I know, how I deal with what I don't, then it's fine. But I think neither LeetCode or AlgoDrill are needed for this. Or to put it another way, if…
this type of stuff is generally for interviews. But it does tell you that the candidate has learned the patterns in question. That particular solution isn't important, but knowing good design patterns to solutions is. Knowing how a decent number of problems are best solves gives them a good intuition of how to tackle problems. Otherwise, they would tackle it using their intuition/vibes. There are books one can read to learn this stuff as well I'm sure, but how do you prove what knowledge you've retained?
10 programmers will write 10 different ways to solve a simple problem. and that code is tech-debt other programmers have to maintain at some point. Just having coders that have the same base-level memorized problem solving patterns can ease that pain, and it can make collaboration/reviews easier down the road.
Re: Show HN: AlgoDrill – Interactive drills to stop forgetting LeetCode patterns
#73What threw me off is the expectation that I use the same variable names and exact same code structure. There are many ways to implement effectively the same thing. I understand that it would be very challenging to implement a way to validate solutions in this way, but memorizing exact fragments of code feels like it's optimizing for the wrong thing.
This by itself completely un-sold me. Requiring such rote memorization is a hard pass for me, it seems the user should just be able to self-assess whether they got it “right” (like Anki cards).
Re: Show HN: AlgoDrill – Interactive drills to stop forgetting LeetCode patterns
#74Any company using leetcode as their primary way to assess competency is time wasting, soulless black hole unworthy of any real talent.
I don't like doing the leetcode grind, but all of the alternatives are strictly worse. * Take home projects filter out people with busy lives. Wastes 100 people's time to hire 1 person. Can't be sure they didn't cheat. No incentives to stop company from giving you a 10 hour assignment and then not looking at it. The candidate with the most time to waste wins. * Relying on academic credentials unfairly favors people f…
I've spent a heck of a lot more time grinding leetcode than I have working on take-home projects. I always enjoyed doing take-home's because I could really spend time on it and make it something worth showing off - if anything it always felt like the perfect low-stress way to show what you can do. It's amazing how many candidates don't take the time to make it look good (or even meet the objectives in many cases).
Haven't done one since pre-LLM era though and that path seems like it might be completely infeasible for employers now.
That said, the most productive interviews I've been a part of as both employee and employer have always been with the technical people that you'll actually work with and conversational in nature. You can learn a lot about what someone knows by listening to their experiences and opinions (but this depends greatly on the quality of the interviewer)
Re: Show HN: AlgoDrill – Interactive drills to stop forgetting LeetCode patterns
#75...the f?! why are we interviewing ppl for things like this?! you either: (a) want DEEP understanding of math and proofs behind algorithms etc. (b) can get away with very high level understanding, and refer to documentation and/or use LLMs for implementation details help there is no real world use case for a middle-ground (c) where you want someone with algo implementation details rote-memorized in their brain and wi…
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Re: Show HN: AlgoDrill – Interactive drills to stop forgetting LeetCode patterns
#76...the f?! why are we interviewing ppl for things like this?! you either: (a) want DEEP understanding of math and proofs behind algorithms etc. (b) can get away with very high level understanding, and refer to documentation and/or use LLMs for implementation details help there is no real world use case for a middle-ground (c) where you want someone with algo implementation details rote-memorized in their brain and wi…
> there is no real world use case for a middle-ground (c) where you want someone with algo implementation details rote-memorized in their brain and without the very deep understanding that would make the rote-memorization unnecessary! I was watching a video recently talking about how Facebook is adding KPIs for its engineers' LLM usage. As in, you will be marked negatively in your performance review if your code is g…
I think the influx of many truly self-driven and resourceful self-taught programmers in the 2010s established a perceptible need (not necessarily an accurate one) of needing to "properly vet" non-degreeed candidates. Stuff like Leetcode is what emerged. The truth is, the "vetting" was originally done via self-selection. Generally computer-oriented and creative people gravitated toward application development and it was worth something to the world. The world probably didn't know how to value this group of people, so continuously tried to put in some kind of formal process.
But like Art, the artists came from everywhere. We're being dishonest if we don't acknowledge what truly made these developers get to where they are, and it wasn't because they originally went "Oh, I know what I'll do, I'll do thousands of Leetcode problems', that is absolutely not the true story of the developer in the last decade.
Leetcode is a sloppy attempt at recognizing and appropriately handling developers. It was an "attempt", a failed one imho. It fundamentally ignores the spirit in which these developers operated in, it reduces them to gym rats, and that's not how they got there.
This being a spiritual problem is what makes the most consistent sense. Even those that grind Leetcode will tell you their heart is not in it (just like GP mentioned above).
Re: Show HN: AlgoDrill – Interactive drills to stop forgetting LeetCode patterns
#77Any company using leetcode as their primary way to assess competency is time wasting, soulless black hole unworthy of any real talent.
I don't like doing the leetcode grind, but all of the alternatives are strictly worse. * Take home projects filter out people with busy lives. Wastes 100 people's time to hire 1 person. Can't be sure they didn't cheat. No incentives to stop company from giving you a 10 hour assignment and then not looking at it. The candidate with the most time to waste wins. * Relying on academic credentials unfairly favors people f…
Its not good for the whole cohort of people who are good at their jobs and aren't good at leetcode.
You're filtering out people who don't have a lot of extra time on their hands to get good at one particular kind of puzzle.
Time poor people like parents, or people that are talented but busy in their current jobs.
Re: Show HN: AlgoDrill – Interactive drills to stop forgetting LeetCode patterns
#78...the f?! why are we interviewing ppl for things like this?! you either: (a) want DEEP understanding of math and proofs behind algorithms etc. (b) can get away with very high level understanding, and refer to documentation and/or use LLMs for implementation details help there is no real world use case for a middle-ground (c) where you want someone with algo implementation details rote-memorized in their brain and wi…
People are sheep. Someone somewhere used mathematical puzzles as interview questions. That someone became big. Others assumed it was because their interview process was amazing and followed blindly. Soon enough the process started to be gamed. I'm seeing this trend again in the field of AI where math olympiad participants are being given God like status by a few companies and the media. Truth is even the most prolifi…
I am guilty of this. I started asking simple programming questions back in the early 90s. It was just a way to see if interviewee knew how to use for loops and conditionals, to see if they can solve simple problems. It was great when taken unprepared, but once people started drilling and memorizing them, the problems became a lot harder. It got to the point where you really have to study, it is not enough to have 20 years of professional programming experience.
Fun story. For years, I used a set of problems that I took from a very old programming book. I have probably seen dozens of solutions for these problems. About 6 years, in an interview, somebody happen to ask me about one of these problems. So, I wrote the solution and the interviewer told me it was wrong, but he couldn't tell me why it was wrong. Then he proceded to clean the screen. (It was remote interview). So I flunk the interview with a problem that I knew back and forth.
Re: Show HN: AlgoDrill – Interactive drills to stop forgetting LeetCode patterns
#79Why is text selection disabled in study mode? Is this an intentional design choice?
Re: Show HN: AlgoDrill – Interactive drills to stop forgetting LeetCode patterns
#80Lol I saw this being spammed in the comments on every reddit thread when looking for interview prep