LeetCode is like the CAPTCHA of hiring
Makes sense. I generally fail both on the first try, despite being both a software engineer and not a robot.
I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today
101–110 of 497 posts
Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today
#102Interviewing people is hard. Most people suck at it. I've interviewed over 100 people in my life, and I've been interviewed about ten times. I know I still suck at it. The code test is one of the more annoying facets of interviews. On the hiring side, it's an efficient way to screen and vet candidates for basic skills. It's relatively low cost to the employer to have a recruiter issue the test. If you come up with yo…
> The code test is one of the more annoying facets of interviews. On the hiring side, it's an efficient way to screen and vet candidates for basic skills. It's relatively low cost to the employer to have a recruiter issue the test.
I agree with you in principle for a programming job, but from the post, this was a dev ops job, and the candidate was asked a dynamic programming question. There was no link to the JD, but I suspect it had little by the way requiring a CS degree.
Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today
#103Interviewing people is hard. Most people suck at it. I've interviewed over 100 people in my life, and I've been interviewed about ten times. I know I still suck at it. The code test is one of the more annoying facets of interviews. On the hiring side, it's an efficient way to screen and vet candidates for basic skills. It's relatively low cost to the employer to have a recruiter issue the test. If you come up with yo…
Everything you say sounds extremely reasonable... but still, there are plenty of stories (mostly online, so they might not actually be true) of people hiring a person that aces (mostly non-technical) interviews only to show absolutely 0 actual technical skills on the job.
Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today
#104Interviewing people is hard. Most people suck at it. I've interviewed over 100 people in my life, and I've been interviewed about ten times. I know I still suck at it. The code test is one of the more annoying facets of interviews. On the hiring side, it's an efficient way to screen and vet candidates for basic skills. It's relatively low cost to the employer to have a recruiter issue the test. If you come up with yo…
I've had interviews start very positively with such an approach of questions, but then "just to be thorough" I have them code something simple on the whiteboard and they completely fail.
Some of them couldn't even get nested for loops to work correctly.
If you're hiring someone to write code for you, you need to have them write code in the interview. There's no substitute for it.
Obviously, you can improve the experience - let them bring their own laptop and code on it, no problem.
Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't ask it snarkily. I've been hired for jobs before and then asked to work on stuff that, while related, was nowhere in the job description. Got hired to do Java/C++ development, was pushed into being part-time sysadmin for our primary test environment because my team had spare capacity and our dev-ops team didn't. There were times I went 6 months without touching a line of Java or C++. Another guy I worked w…
Fair enough; phrase it "What would my day-to-day work look like?" "What percentage of time coding/designing/testing/meetings?" The current interview process could be better but right now these coding questions are just a proxy for ability/aptitude. I just want you to have the best shot at this job. Be as critical about the process as you want after you get it.
Wasn't trying to be confrontational, advice from the other side of the table is always appreciated. :)
And you're right. 9/10 times it'll just be a fizzbuzz proxy and not worth the risk of a direct question.
Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first and foremost purpose of practicing let code is to get the job, thats the benefit. You do it in addition of learning skills you use on your job.
Yes, and this wastes time compared to the situation where there is no useless use of leetcode-like tests.
Company use leetcode style because is not useless. it make the interview process more streamlined, scalable and predictable.
For the me interviewee, it also make the interview process more streamlined, scalable and predictable. I practice once and I can use it for many other company, thus save my time.
Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't matter whether it's hard or not, it's at best a mediocre tool to determine programming skills. Also, it leads to a spiral of becoming worse: 1. being able to solve LeetCode tasks doesn't mean you're a good developer 2. not being able to solve these tasks doesn't mean you're a bad developer. So we have a tool that has a certain (IMHO high) rate of false positives and false negatives. 3. people start realisi…
You have to consider the perspective of a company or a recruiter. Their goal is not to simply find somebody who is capable, it's to take the hundreds if not thousands of prospective applicants they have and then cull that down to the tiny handful that they advance along for the openings that they have available. You're not looking for reasons to accept people, but for reasons to reject them. It's just the nature of e…
This is (kind of) fine if you’re a well known company with thousands of applicants, but my experience so far has been that finding qualified candidates in the first place has always been the hard bit. I can’t imagine throwing arbitrary hurdles in the way of getting good people into interviews and talking to them!
Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today
#108I guess if you don't like the company's interviewing process you don't have to work there. Unemployment rate for software engineers is pretty low these days so just go with somewhere else. I'll keep working at places that ask programming questions because basically all the highest-paying places do that these days. And as snobby as it sounds, I want to keep working with other people who can pass algorithms teasers Als…
> they generally do require programming knowledge Yes > probably an algorithm here and there No Even Amazon doesn't ask about algorithms for DevOps. When I interviewed with them for a DevOps position, they asked me to write a Python script to parse logs files. They also asked about various linux commands that you would use to work with those same logs. Pretty relevant. But the interviewer never once asked about algor…
Hm. I spoke with Amazon (AWS) recently (haven't interviewed yet), and they made the express point that if I were to accept an interview that I should brush up on my algos and HackerRank questions because they loved HackerRank and would surely use a series of those-style problems throughout the interview process.
My last in-depth interview was a take-home/collaborative project (paid) for a smaller company here in Canada. It was a great experience. So good on you.
Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today
#109The actual question involved:
> So basically it was a variation of the exact change problem (I realized afterwards). You had to validate a string of size n. 1 chunk of 8 characters could have 1 format, 1 chunk of 16 characters another, and 1 chunk of 24 characters another. You essentially had to determine if the string was valid. So in other words, find a combination of these sizes in which the string could be validated. I had 30 minutes
> It can be a string of size n. It needs to form a valid combo of 8, 16, and 24 char strings - each of which have an expected format. Result is T or F
This sounds like a pretty basic parsing problem to me, not dynamic programming, and likely to be a regular language. There’s a standard tool for this sort of thing, a “regular expression”. Not recognizing this much is a huge red flag for any kind of systems/integration role, like DevOps.
The answer here is just matching against this regex, with “fmt1”, “fmt2”, and “fmt3” replaced by regular expressions for the different packet formats:
^(fmt1|fmt2|fmt3)*$Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today
#110When interviewing people I usually push until I get the candidate to answer "I don't know" on SOMETHING, just to see if they can do it. Not everyone can, and a lot of people will happily come up with a technical word salad to hide their perfectly understandable ignorance on some obscure technical problem I just came up with. That way you get to hear how they ask technical questions. Asking questions is a valuable (and largely separate) skill too.
It's important to have someone who is able to stop and ask for help instead of going further down a blind alley. I've found it filters out a lot of the know it all types who never mange to get anything done.
I doubt that was the intent of the OP's interviewer, but you never know.