Pretty frustrating when 2 years ago you're solving leetcode problems with GPT-3, and can demonstrate it inside a facebook interview but the interview process doesn't factor in the 10x programmer, and doesn't recognise any TRULY out of the box thinking. Leetcode was dead when GPT-3 came out
Stop Interviewing with Leet Code
151–160 of 675 posts
Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code
#152Considering the normalization of spending hundreds of hours grinding LC questions and the industry built around whiteboard interview preparation, my (n=1) conclusion is that LC interviews is not about technical assessment at all.
It's an assessment that's designed to find people who are ready to submit to an endless grind with little to no skepticism. Developers who question the technical usefulness of LC interviews are simply not the target audience anymore. The target audience seems to be potential employees that are hungry and without leverage.
Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Someone who builds a truly novel technology solution involving hundreds of hours of effort This person should already have enough of a reputation to get a job at many companies, if their work is public enough. What do you suggest for the 99%+ other candidates?
I have over a decade of experience, including driving big technical change at one organisation, and was filtered out by a timed leetcode test. I put together a repository of leetcode practice, as I had a feeling that I would have bad luck on the day. They didn't look at this. The internal recruiter said it kept happening for seniors and people with a lot of experience, but his hands were tied, as the leetcode process…
Actually best thing happened to you evading the work under this CTO
Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code
#154Do people actually pay for leetcode premium? If so, that whole business is byproduct of the interview industry to defeat it which is fun.
Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Someone who builds a truly novel technology solution involving hundreds of hours of effort This person should already have enough of a reputation to get a job at many companies, if their work is public enough. What do you suggest for the 99%+ other candidates?
> This person should already have enough of a reputation to get a job at many companies, if their work is public enough. But then why do people with that kind of reputation still (at certain companies) have to jump through these hoops? https://www.theregister.com/2010/04/21/ken_thompson_take_our... > What do you suggest for the 99%+ other candidates? What about (instead of forcing a months long decision process upon…
That's a big overhead for both the candidate and the company. Only an unemployed candidate could do that, and even then they'd have to stop interviewing at other places to dedicate the month. No thanks.
Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code
#156All of these supposed "flaws" of leetcode are by design. Big companies want people who are smart enough to do the work, but obedient enough to put up with all the bullshit that comes with working at a big company. What person better matches that than someone who's able and willing to study for and pass a tech version of the SAT? Every anti-leetcode article I read is some version of "leetcode is bad because it measure…
I have a saying that sums this up:
"How you hire is whom you hire."
Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have over a decade of experience, including driving big technical change at one organisation, and was filtered out by a timed leetcode test. I put together a repository of leetcode practice, as I had a feeling that I would have bad luck on the day. They didn't look at this. The internal recruiter said it kept happening for seniors and people with a lot of experience, but his hands were tied, as the leetcode process…
>it kept happening for seniors and people with a lot of experience Why would this be? Old brains not being as "flexible" to think up novel solutions?
I've forgotten most of the algorithm stuff I learned at university that I haven't used in my job. I know how dynamic programming works and I can recognise such a problem, but don't ask me to implement it in an hour. I know how graphs work and what the various algorithms are, but why would I implement any of them when I can just import networkx?
Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code
#158All of these supposed "flaws" of leetcode are by design. Big companies want people who are smart enough to do the work, but obedient enough to put up with all the bullshit that comes with working at a big company. What person better matches that than someone who's able and willing to study for and pass a tech version of the SAT? Every anti-leetcode article I read is some version of "leetcode is bad because it measure…
startups need even more obedient ones
those who will overwork, be on call 24/7, doing 10 men's jobs at once and can tolerate abuse from managers, because you want your stock options to vest
Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Asking contrived algorithmic puzzles might prove nothing, but the examples in TFA are actually pretty basic programming: “I have an array with positive numbers, find the n^th largest”
yeah, but in real world when this kind of problem will need to be solved people will most probably sort O(N logN), or use priority queue O(N logK), or even will go with something like O(N*K), almost no one will go with O(N) algo and because usually N and K are rather small and this code will not be called too often time complexity may be ignored. Still any solution shorter than O(N) will be called inefficient. And in…
Moreover, with the micro-optimized SIMD quicksort algos that are perennially cropping up on this website... I would be willing to bet that "sort and take first N" is objectively faster than my crappy Python implementation -- even if it is linear time.
Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code
#160I think that a blanket rejection of the "Leetcode" style interview is too broad. They are a tool, and like any tool, one should try and understand when they are appropriate for the job. If the "the job" is to try and provide a fairly level playing field on which to assess candidates on raw problem-solving ability and programming intuition, these are useful tools. There are the same problems as with any test of this kind (you can improve your results by learning the format of the test well), but there's still a lot of signal. If you're trying to hire based on the things these tests measure, you should you use them. As the post points out, correctly, those are far from the only qualities required for many jobs, and anecdotally it seems like some companies are overusing this one type of interview, but the solution is for interviewers to assess what they are trying to select for, and make sure that their selection process measures it as well as possible. Part of that process may well still be puzzle-style interviews.