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Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

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Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#361

Post by q-big »

brhsagain wrote: post #148

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…

> 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?

Leetcode rather measures whether you are into brutal cramming. Let's put it this way: the kind of people that fits this property is in my opinion often "a little bit special", i.e. not the kind of employee that in my experience both startups and big companies prefer.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#362

Post by devonkim »

blueflow wrote: post #235
devonkim wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Systemic problems being blamed on individuals is not going to help. Of course society is a shared responsibility model essentially but it means even a highly skilled and otherwise technically competent and qualified engineer in an inadequately structured system can regularly produce garbage work. Having to hire nothing but the best to achieve decent or viable output IMO moreso implies that the processes or systems ar…

As an adult its your responsibility to produce sensible quality despite social factors. You can not expect society to hold your hand.

I understand this but there’s a huge gulf of nuance between expecting hand holding and keeping your head down while bad management expects great work output and results despite problems of their individual failures either.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#363

Post by dekhn »

jmvoodoo wrote: post #244
brandall10 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every unicorny startup I've interviewed w/ that had a standard big-tech interview loop (1 LC style screener + final w/ 2-3 rounds of LC + 1 system design) was chock full of ex-big tech engineers and managers, replete with stories about wanting a faster paced / dynamic environment. So yes, that absolutely is who they are recruiting. It probably comes down to no more than believing big tech companies have the very best…

I wonder which came first? Did they hire those people because they implemented leetcode style interviews, or did they implement those interviews because they originally hired or were founded by ex-bigco folks that simply did what they knew?

The predecessors to leetcode questions were being asked, for example, in PhD defense dissertations as well as some that were highly specific to the company in questions (sort 2MB of data 1MB RAM). Many of the problems are basically late-undergrad, early-graduate CS student problems.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#364

Post by dekhn »

brandall10 wrote: post #307
danaris wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leetcode doesn't measure "smart and determined to succeed". It measures "has enough extra time and energy to devote to practicing pointless brainteasers for weeks." In other words, whatever it's intended to do, one of its primary functions in practice is to screen out people who are bright, driven...and poor, working long hours and trying to keep themselves and/or their families going.

Weeks? There are stories on Blind and the LC forums of people taking upwards of a year with pretty hefty real-life constraints. And why wouldn't they, given the opportunity to essentially double comp over standard industry jobs? That's a life changing opportunity if you're in a somewhat unfortunate life situation. That it's a bit of a sacrifice is the point. If you're naturally smart enough this stuff comes quickly,…

Took me about 5 years to get even modestly proficient with medium-level leetcode questions. I'm a slow learner.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#365

Post by wtetzner »

andrewingram wrote: post #212
nonameiguess wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proble…

> "Their ability to filter out 'those who can't code' in an efficient manor while sacrificing a small amount" This is the assumption I was referring to, that the "sacrifice" is small. It's suggesting that the false-negative rate for LeetCode challenges is small, and I'd argue it's actually quite high -- as you also suggest (your rate is 90%).

You might be right, but I don’t think that particular assumption being wrong necessarily matters.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#366

Post by dekhn »

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.

You are factually wrong. Not only that, you're conflating several different processes and team rules.

Many googlers use brew to install applications on their laptops. This not against policy. Other googlers work with code stored directly on their laptop. There may even be developers who are obtaining deps (for their own builds) from brew.

The problem with the brew author is that he had every opportunity to make himself look hirable at Google but instead chose to write an incorrect screed and publish it on the internet.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#367

Post by dekhn »

UncleMeat wrote: post #233
onei wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the code being in a VM mutually exclusive with having homebrew installed?

Why would I install homebrew on a work laptop if I cannot build or run code on my work laptop? Why would I install a dependency management system if company policy is that all third party code is checked into the repo as source and built using blaze?

When I worked for google, several of my projects were developed locally on laptops. My intern (who was developing tensorflow robotics computer vision stuff) used homebrew to install tools. Not everybody at Google used blaze.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#368

Post by redisman »

dekhn wrote: post #364
brandall10 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weeks? There are stories on Blind and the LC forums of people taking upwards of a year with pretty hefty real-life constraints. And why wouldn't they, given the opportunity to essentially double comp over standard industry jobs? That's a life changing opportunity if you're in a somewhat unfortunate life situation. That it's a bit of a sacrifice is the point. If you're naturally smart enough this stuff comes quickly,…

Took me about 5 years to get even modestly proficient with medium-level leetcode questions. I'm a slow learner.

I never did a CS degree so much of the learning was decently useful but it also took me years

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#369

Post by dekhn »

UncleMeat wrote: post #346
corrral wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn't use Brew to obtain dependencies. This is how you end up with people complaining about a brew upgrade replacing the version of Postgres their project depends on. You probably shouldn't be using dpkg or rpm for that, either, unless your CI and deployment targets are running the exact same version of Linux that you are, and even then—there are usually cleaner and more cross-platform/distro ways to do it, e…

That's fine, but almost nobody is running tools on their MBP. So for this sort of thing you'd be using the package manager distributed with glinux. And Google is also a really weird island where tons of tools are custom. You cant use some open source tool for git bisecting because Google doesn't use git. You cant use some open source tool for debugging because borg is a weird custom mess and attaching debuggers requi…

Google uses git. I used to sit next to Junio Hamano, the primary developer of git, and lots of teams that used my team's services were using git. Lots and lots of teams. There was even an extension to use git with google3, which was really nice, but was replaced with a system that used hg instead.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#370

Post by yolo69420 »

brhsagain wrote: post #148

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 post is way too optimistic. you're implying the people making the decision that leetcode tests are used are competent enough to know they suck but still use them for the soft-factors you mention. I would bet essentially all of my money that instead they're simply incompetent and actually think these tests are good at testing ability.

that being said, everybody talks about like leetcode tests for a week straight is the norm. I've recently been through the whole thing with several big tech companies and some smaller companies, and all of them only used them for the phone screen.

in fact with microsoft for various reasons they skipped my phone screen and I went straight to onsite, and there was no leetcoding involved at all. still some whiteboard coding, but rather about highly specialized problems relevant to my field, none of this algorithm puzzle bullshit.

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