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Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

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Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#161
post #136
post #75

Someone who builds a truly novel technology solution involving hundreds of hours of effort gets filtered out of an interview involving contrived scenarios. You may have built the next generation X, but given an array of strings and a fixed width, can you format the text such that each line has exactly maxWidth characters and is fully justified -- in the next 30 minutes? Maybe you should have cultivated that skillset…

This reminds me of creator of „brew” who got declined by Google because he couldnt write a reverse binary tree search in 1h. Dont mind that half of Google is using his work for free.

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Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#162

All 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

Getting paid literally 1/2 of less of what you make at FAANG...

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#163

All 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…

This reminds me of the interview process at Thinking Machines, where the interview was working onsite for a week and then getting voted on.

Or Pixar which required you to excel in atleast one thing in your life

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#165
I used to work in a bank and wrote an interview script for my department (kdb+/q market data). It mainly consisted of having the candidate sit in front of an interpreter, and walk them through a script which looked something like:

1. Load a data file here

2. Tell me some facts about the data

3. Here's another dataset, can we use both to figure something out.

4. One of the executions for this order is missing, how can we find which one.

5. Here is a data feed, can you write a process to ingest the data and calculate something in real time.

I by far preferred this system to the alternative which was to ask trivia questions and see if the candidate memorised the docs. There is of course some value in asking basics, or to elaborate etc. But on the spot algo questions are usually only useful in filtering people who either like leetcode problems, or have grinded them for the last 6 months.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#166
Pointless. All they do is confirm that you can remember algorithms you’ll never use in real life. I won’t work with anyone who uses them… I’d hate to work with a group of people who got their jobs solving riddles rather than building software.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#167
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of creator of „brew” who got declined by Google because he couldnt write a reverse binary tree search in 1h. Dont mind that half of Google is using his work for free.

That wasn’t actually true. He later said that he wasn’t asked to invert a binary tree. Also, nobody at google is using homebrew for work.

None of them own a Mac?

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#168

Do people actually pay for leetcode premium? If so, that whole business is byproduct of the interview industry to defeat it which is fun.

I did - I paid less than I would for a video game, and had as much fun :D

Was it actually useful to improve your skills and you ending up with good solution in the coding round? And how many hours of practice does it usually take to get ok with these type of problems/solutions? :D

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#169

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…

That assumption isn't being made at all. That's why it says with sufficient throughput of candidates. If you need to hire 100 people, have 10,000 candidates, 1,000 of whom are qualified, and a 90% false negative rate, you'll get the 100 true positives you need, while leaving 900 well-qualified people pissed off. The process is bad for most of the candidates, but works fine for the company doing the hiring.

The problem comes when smaller companies that don't have the same high rate of new applicants use the same process and then complain they can't find anyone.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#170

All 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

doing 10 men's jobs at once

10 what now?

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