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Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

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Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#191

Post by anonymoushn »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #187
kanonieer wrote: post #152

Considering 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…

> Considering 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. The “hundreds of hours” grinding LC is largely for juniors without experience. I don’t know any senior engineers who had to grind LeetCode like that for their FAANG interviews.

People frequently post here saying that they are senior and needed to do that or would need to do that.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#192

Post by willcipriano »

yonaguska wrote: post #179
gitfan86 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a huge inefficiency in the economy that thousands of people are studying and practicing for an entrance exam that has no value in the real work that the companies actually do. But overall that may be a good thing for society. If Google fired all their leet coders and replaced them with real engineers they would not need as many. And the biggest problem may be that there is a limited number of real engin…

In your opinion, what's the difference between a leetcoder and a real engineer? In my mind, a real engineer really shines in the non technical aspect of things, like coordination, communication, prioritization, and getting hard questions answered. But that's just me, I'm curious what everyone else's experiences are.

To me a real engineer is good at engineering, what you described sounds like a good HR manager.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#194

Post by ehnto »

hiq wrote: post #88
Dowwie wrote: 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…

> 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 think it would be exceptionally hard to build an individual reputation in the tech community in general, props to those who have, but building a reputation in a specific industry and local community is much more achievable for everyone.

In smaller industry niches this can be true for companies more than people. At this point in my career, the fact that I worked at Company X is evidence enough that I can do the job Company Y wants me for, since it's a tight industry they essentially know of the work I was doing, even though it wasn't a groundbreaking novel technology of my own.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#195

Post by hexa00 »

This is crazy and needs to stop indeed it's like you have:

- A degree (In which you've proven you can understand these algos and spent 4 years studying)

  I'm not going to redo all that in 1 week before your stupid puzzle!
- Experience (That has to be worth something it's not like everyone is lying about it)

- You may have open source contributions

But no, some companies will not even start to look at that or not look at all, before they ask you this stupid puzzle.

Personally I now filter those companies out, I mean 20 years of experience, contributions in major open source projects, if you can't recognize that? why would I interview?

Were I work now we give code assignments, while they take longer to do you can actually see structure which I agree with the author is the top quality I'm looking for. They are also less stressful for the candidate.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#196

Post by grogers »

przemelek wrote: post #127
goodpoint wrote: post #121

Earlier 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…

I mean, in the real world you probably use a library method. If I were an interviewer I would not be expecting the candidate know about median-of-medians (O(n) worst case). I wouldn't even expect they know a-priori about quickselect (O(n) avg). But I don't think it's unreasonable that given a few hints, a candidate could understand and implement quickselect in 30 mins. Most people know about quicksort already, and quickselect is not very different. You can even give them the partition and select_pivot function at the start and then if there's time have them fill those in. In the rare situation they haven't even heard of quicksort, you can even write the shell of the algorithm for them, and have them adapt it to quickselect.

Even then, all thats probably a bonus - a priority queue implementation, or many other possible solutions are probably good enough for me.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#197

Post by EdwardDiego »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #141
bruce343434 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

You think LeetCode problems require novel solutions? It's the exact opposite: they're great for new grads who just spent 4+ years cramming for exams.

Bingo. I was asked recently to find the maximum subarray of an array, in a live coding exercise. In TypeScript. So, JS, but with type annotations.

The interviewer themself said "this is probably more aimed at someone who just graduated."

It was for a senior data engineering role, where the odds of me implementing classic dynamic programming problems on the regular are slim to none.

They made me an offer anyway, but I just wonder what value they found in that. Oh, he knows about Big O? He's heard of memoisation?

They were big on FP, apparently. But not Scala, there was too much FP in that for them, hence the TypeScript.

Mind you my first ever rejection was for a Python role back in 2011 when Python was still very niche in my country, and while I had a portfolio of, imo, pretty decent Python code, they weren't interested because I didn't have a degree, and people without degrees write unstructured code.

Which is a very long way of saying, every interview process ultimately devolves into people hiring people like them.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#198

Post by jmartin2683 »

blueflow wrote: post #186
bpicolo wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> replaced them with real engineers nice gatekeeping. Shame on them for working to get a job they want.

After seeing all the unreliable and buggy software, i think more gatekeeping in IT would probably be beneficial. You wouldn't let someone do surgery on you that hasn't been to medical school.

Good engineers learned their craft long before any school got ahold of them. The really good ones skipped the handholding.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#199

Post by lentil_soup »

totorovirus wrote: post #14

I keep seeing this kind of article that leetcode is not the answer. Yes it is not the answer but the best strategy to filter out not dumb, low IQ people who are going to panic when you give a vague, open ended problem. There are many people who call themselves engineers while trying to talk everything out instead of diving deep into problem.

what part of leetcode gives you "vague, open ended problems"? It's a database of cookie cutter problems that have a one and only solution

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#200

Post by EdwardDiego »

UncleMeat wrote: post #178
l-lousy wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone using a Mac for tech related jobs has a high probability of using brew. That includes a lot of googlers

Google doesn't allow any code on laptops. Everything is done via web IDEs or ssh into a linux machine. So nobody is using brew to obtain dependencies.

Do you work for Google? I'm just doubting you a little. Like the guy from project zero is finding bugs in Windows via ssh to a Linux machine? Definitely going with Doubt here.
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