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I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

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Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#111

Post by avgDev »

arnvald wrote: post #39
matz1 wrote: post #31

Complaining about leetcode is unproductive. Leetcode is not even that hard, tons of material and key to the answer is on the internet. Another benefit is, its streamline job searching. You practice once and you can use the same skill to interview for many companies.

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…

Honestly, I pass on companies that do leetcode, I'm simply not going to do it.

In my day to day I am working on mission critical applications, creating web applications that rely on legacy databases, writing SQL SPs. I'm decent considering my short career, i try to improve on every previous project. However, when I go home I'm not wasting my time grinding leetcode, even though I was top of every class in college, algorithms, data structures, theory of computation and so on. I'm competent and pick up new stuff very easily. I tell recruiters I will pass on an interview if they are doing leetcode/hackerrank. I'm okay to solve some coding problems that they have day to day, talk about architecture/design, talk about what I'm good at and where I want to improve. I also wish other people would stop grinding leetcode and that everyone was realistic about the job at hand. Most developers won't be writing the most efficient code, but start easy and refactor if certain part of the application becomes a bottleneck.

Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#112

Post by malvosenior »

Stronico wrote: post #110

When 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 (an…

Doing this during a job interview is not going to give you the results you expect. For every person like you who wants to hear "I don't know" there are 10 people who will pass on you for not knowing something. People's expectations are set by the worst interviewers they experience, not the best (and honestly, trying to trap people isn't the "best" anyway).

Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#113

Post by officialchicken »

deminature wrote: post #100
jlengrand wrote: post #77

I got into the habit of answering those questions orally, and then directly asking when was the last time it has been used by the person interviewing. In some cases the interviewer didn't quite like it, but most of the times it actually led into interesting discussions (finding questions is hard, what they are trying to gather as info ...). I'm based in Europe though, so YMMV

It's frustrating for the interviewer, because they usually need to photograph your working out to allow others to independently check it later, and insisting on verbally solving a problem denies that.

I'm not afraid to hire people who challenge and ask great questions. I ask that question all the time. The interviewer should be involved with improving the hiring process, not following the cargo cult of "hiring process". Obviously if that question comes up more often, they might start asking "why are we doing X?" and "does X provide better outcomes?"

Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#114

Post by ilikehurdles »

GhostVII wrote: post #62

I feel like interviews are more of a legal IQ test than anything else. If you are smart and spend a couple weeks grinding LeetCode, you should be able to solve most of those types of problems pretty quickly, so those types of interviews filter out those who either aren't willing to spend time on LeetCode to get the job, or those who aren't smart enough to quickly match up the interview problem with the ones they have…

Ignoring all the false assumptions you make about IQ, the couple of weeks I could have spent grinding LeetCode I instead spent applying and interviewing at other companies. Maybe I could have had 3 rather than 2 offers by the time I made my decision if I didn't ignore Company X, but I also might not have, as my focus on LC would have taken away focus from preparing for interviewing with companies who know how to hire engineers.

In my experience, a company using LC usually means that, if hired, 95% of your coworkers will be young 20-somethings fresh out of college. Generally, that is who has the time and lack of self-worth to put themselves through this process.

But the often-mocked LC interview wasn't as prevalent as I thought it would be. As a senior+ engineer I generally saw some system design whiteboarding and some take-homes, with a lot of engineer-run companies proudly proclaiming during the interview process that they don't interview that way. So I get it, LC is the standardized test for college grads entering the real world who have no professional experience to demonstrate. And that's fair, you gotta vet junior engineers somehow, I guess.

The one company that asked me straight-from-the-book LC-style puzzlers was an established SF-based startup that opened an office locally. Luckily it was a puzzler I had already watched someone solve on youtube and had memorized so thanks for testing nothing about my technical ability I guess.

Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#115

Post by skrebbel »

Stronico wrote: post #110

When 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 (an…

That's a trick question. Trick questions are bad because they test interviewing skill and not programming skill.

It's a trick question because you want the interviewee to answer something different (I don't know) than what you're asking them to answer. Confident applicants might feel up to saying they don't know, but nervous people who are very self conscious in an interview setting may respond completely differently than they would if they were asked the same question on the job by the coffee machine. Their mind would be racing "oh no, I'll look so bad" and they'd go into full panic mode.

Don't ask trick questions. It's smug and useless. Plus you'll be missing out on great smart colleagues who happen to stress out about job interviews.

Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#116

Post by malvosenior »

tomp wrote: post #103
caymanjim wrote: post #85

Interviewing 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.

In my experience (also interviewing hundreds of people) this is totally an urban (internet) legend. Not once has someone been able to talk intelligently and at length about a project they built and the underlying technology choices and then been unable to deliver. Once you gain experience building things yourself, it's pretty easy to suss out whether someone is any good just by talking to them. No coding tests needed.

Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#117

Post by SubuSS »

kd5bjo wrote: post #109

The 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 valida…

The problem is that is bound by your regex implementation and how it handled overlaps the search strings :). Fwiw many places will just go the next step of - well implement the regex parsing then!

But this is a dev perspective though. Am assuming a scripting answer might be good if the candidate knows about the actual regex behavior for devops.

Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#118

Post by namdnay »

cryptozeus wrote: post #7

They can, it depends on the role. Not referring to you but I have never understood why DevOps at many companies can’t program and are just hired to copy paste files. “DevOps is a set of software development practices that combines software development and information technology operations to shorten the systems development life cycle while delivering features, fixes, and updates frequently in close alignment with bus…

I always thought that the whole point of DevOps was to stop having dev and ops and just have engineers who can do it all from A to Z

Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#119

Post by SubuSS »

tomp wrote: post #103
caymanjim wrote: post #85

Interviewing 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.

I agree with the urban legend guess.

Yeah it happens, but not as often as you think.

Re: I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today

#120

Post by ummonk »

kd5bjo wrote: post #109

The 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 valida…

I'm not sure they were going for the regex answer - it seems like they expected the DP answer since they're using multiples of 8, which allow you to do it as a DP problem quite easily.
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