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Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

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Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#101

Post by quickthrower2 »

shantnutiwari wrote: post #83

We keep seeing posts like these on HN/Reddit, yet companies keep using them. And companies like Faang (or is it Manga now??), whose engineers I would think would hang out on HN So it either means: 1. HN's influence is even less than we thought-- even MANGA engineers /10x silicon valley types dont hang out here 2. Everyone agrees its a good idea, but no one cares. Like everyone agrees we should care about the environm…

MANGA engineers cant change shit. They are drones (not a criticism, I am saying like worker bees in a big colony). Startup Engineers can (but just for their startup)

Also if you have been hazed you wont vote to stop the hazing

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#102

Post by wiseowise »

andrewingram wrote: post #86
deadcore wrote: post #67

Don't get me wrong I hate LeetCode-style interviews as much as the next guy. In fact I really, really, really suck at them! Not sure if that says more about my ability then anything but c'est la vie In the defence of LeetCode-style questions, I do think they work, and very well may I add - with the caveat you have the throughput of candidate to make it work well? Their ability to filter out 'those who can't code' in…

There's an assumption you're making that these challenges only filter out a small amount of qualified candidates. I suspect the percentage is actually quite significant. In my experience it's usually bigger "looks good on a resume" companies that do these challenges, which suggests they're getting enough candidates in the funnel to be able to afford turning away a lot of more-than-qualified applicants. I've failed mo…

> There's an assumption you're making that these challenges only filter out a small amount of qualified candidates. I suspect the percentage is actually quite significant.

Statistically that’s irrelevant, as they optimize for “do not let through rotten apple”, rather than “find good apple”.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#103

Post by ht_th »

mellavora wrote: post #69
yieldcrv wrote: post #3

> Alternatively, look at under-performing people and find what they are lacking This is great suggestion. While the “look at their github” one is a bad suggestion. Github polishing is theatre more suited for theatre majors instead of people actually working with integrity before coming to your company. Its very similar to the issue with the leetcode interviews as its geared towards people with time to optimize that i…

Agree that "look at github" is not helpful. I have 30+ years software dev and almost nothing on github. There are valid reasons why a person who writes lots of code, including on weekends/spare time, would not be on github. For my personal projects I prefer bitbucket. For professional work, it is proprietary and thus cannot be shared (esp not in an interview!!).

Sure, but if you do have something meaningful on GitHub or where ever, and you share this in your CV, I would expect that the interviewers look at that. Or at least, I would not like to do some stupid coding exercises that are less complex, less authentic, and basically one-dimensional compared to my work on these open source projects.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#104

Post by Doolwind »

throwaddzuzxd wrote: post #96

In my team we do technical interviews in three steps: - an algorithmic challenge. It's related to what we do day to day. I work in domain names so we ask to parse a domain name. There are oddities with domain names so we check multiple things: does the candidate know what basic string manipulation functions exist? do they ask questions to get more info? how do they react when we give additional info that break the co…

I really like the refactoring challenge idea. Any tips on what’s worked or not? Do you do domain specific code or try and keep it generic? I think having them not write code is particularly good way to handle this.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#105

Post by GuB-42 »

water8 wrote: post #51
nivenkos wrote: post #22

It's much better than the alternative and ideally only one part of the interview process. Ultimately the proof is in the pudding, I've had loads of candidates that could barely code and Leetcode-style problems are a great filter against that. Otherwise you risk just getting PM-style bullshitters as engineers, who talk persuasively about projects that other people actually implemented.

It’s absolutely hilarious you think leetcode would give you the skills to design anything larger than a simple website. I don’t recall leet code ever talking about how to set up an infrastructure that has reliability on an enterprise-level where seconds of downtime means millions of dollars lost. But you’ll be really good at hash maps and quicksort which make for good worker drones, not necessarily good engineers. th…

> It’s absolutely hilarious you think leetcode would give you the skills to design anything larger than a simple website.

The point of leetcode is not to show what you can do, it is to show what you can't do.

To keep up with your analogy, being able to design a simple website doesn't make you able to set-up an enterprise-level infrastructure, but if someone isn't able to design a simple website, I don't want to hire him for my enterprise-level infrastructure.

As for "outside the box" thinking, it only works if you know where the box is, otherwise you are just being clueless.

And by the way, because it is an argument I see way too often, calling the "sort" function of your favorite library instead of doing the exercise "as intended" is not "outside the box" thinking, it is literally the most obvious thing to do. What could count as "outside the box" would realizing that you can solve the problem more efficiently by not sorting anything at all, which requires you to know your sorting algorithms to show that it is indeed more efficient.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#106

Post by rideg »

I think the LC interview measures how determined your are. Are you willing to spend hours and hours to solve boring/meaningless coding exercises in order to pass the interview or not? Because even if you are smart and a good coder if you haven’t seen the problem before it is extremely unlikely to give optimal solution to 2 LC medium or 1 hard problem within 45 minutes. Your only option is to practice.

So if you willing to spend your free time mindlessly practicing, you will be a good ant at the company. Which is very desired since most of business programming is boring and repetitive and does not require creativity.

Also, validating the solution is simple. Does not need too much effort and creativity from the person conducting the interview.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#107

Post by wiseowise »

j245 wrote: post #76
water8 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s absolutely hilarious you think leetcode would give you the skills to design anything larger than a simple website. I don’t recall leet code ever talking about how to set up an infrastructure that has reliability on an enterprise-level where seconds of downtime means millions of dollars lost. But you’ll be really good at hash maps and quicksort which make for good worker drones, not necessarily good engineers. th…

“Absolutely hilarious” that you’re forgetting there is usually a system design round that tests things like “setting up infrastructure on an enterprise-level”. The coding round is supposed to test that.. you can code. For the record I’m also not a fan of the Leet Code style rounds, even though I actually find completing them (outside of an interview) quite fun.

That’s the usual tactic of LeetCode haters: find a straw man and ignore the big picture.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#108

Post by bil7 »

charcircuit wrote: post #25
bil7 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if the "simple questions" are realistic problems they might face day to day, fair enough. But the classic example in these articles is an exercise like invert a binary tree, which most people never have nor will need to do, making it a poor test.

>which most people never have nor will need to do That doesn't mean that someone would be unable to program it. Inverting a binary tree tests if you know how to traverse a tree. I may not traverse trees all day at work, but I can easily do a tree traversal if I needed to and I expect that to be true of most people who can actually program and not just talk the talk.

I understand what you mean, I could also probably pass the test. But what is the utility in an arcane test like this? If I'm hiring web developers, I'd want them to see how they apply their knowledge to a realistic scenario. There is a real chance that a potentially great hire with decent experience in a desirable technology will fail the inversion task.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#109

Post by natly »

To be honest if I was an employer I probably would do leet code or similar. The logic would be that yes, many engineers are shy or nervous around people. But losing those is worth it since hiring someone bad that you have to fire (that wastes some months of productive time at the company) and then re-hire someone else is definitely worth that risk. Having made something impressive on github is somewhat fakeable since you can get a lot of help from the internet or even copy large chunks (that you may understand but didn't have to invent) from stack overflow. Someone who can do leet code at least have some hard-to-fake ability to reason and work under pressure.

That said, I still don't like doing leet code interviews and I'm pretty bad at them, but that's the logic that imagine goes on in an employers mind (hence why "they're missing out on some types of candidates" logic likely won't sway anyone reading these comments I suspect).

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#110

Post by wiseowise »

padjo wrote: post #77
varjag wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technical interview might not bring people out of their shell but sure helps filter out bullshit.

Does it though? Often times all it tells you is that this person probably saw this question before.

Yes, it does. It shows that they at least shown an interest in this kind of thing.
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