Stop Interviewing with Leet Code • Hacker News Board

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#391

Post by twic » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:20 PM UTC

jamesdhutton wrote: post #28

In a previous job of mine, we would show candidates a printout of some buggy code, and ask them to find the bugs. We would leave the room and let the candidate work through it on their own. The code in question was basic algorithms and data structure stuff in C++, such as inserting into a doubly-linked list. I always thought it was a good exercise. Suits slow-thinkers and nervous people, and it's a good test of codin…

I've been on both sides of this, and i think it's decent.

But i have also heard people say "Oh my god! They asked me to do a debugging exercise - ON PAPER!!!? What were they thinking?!".

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#392

Post by throwaddzuzxd » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:23 PM UTC

fatherzine wrote: post #243

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…

"an architecture challenge" oooh, these are the worst :) I can usually research a decent solution for most "architectural challenges" in 15-30 mins, but I find it so difficult to have on my brain rolodex a wide variety of possible answers and probe live which of them will not disappoint a specific interviewer :)

Again, this is mainly for screening and understanding what the candidate knows. There's no single right answers: some candidates will talk about assets caching, others will focus on software optimizations, others on infrastructure, or database...

High availability is one of our core problems, so a candidate must be familiar with at least some of the answers. And again, we still guide the candidate on the different points if they're stuck ("what about the db?", "what if the clients are in the US and in Europe?", etc.)

If an interviewer expects a single "right" answer, they're doing it wrong.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#393

Post by donretag » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:24 PM UTC

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…

"companies want people who are smart enough to do the work, but obedient enough to put up with all the bullshit"

Which is why I love leetcode interviews: I get an insight at how a company, especially tech management, operates. During the dog-n-pony show interview, I will put up with it, but will definitely cast the company in a poor light. I tell companies that I am interviewing with that I will not prepare with leetcode (some will suggest it). I rather spend my time reading higher-level concepts. You know, the stuff that actually helps in modern software development.

I left out the word "big" in my quote. Companies of all sizes do leetcode interviews and want heads down and STFU type of developers.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#394

Post by DragonStrength » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:24 PM UTC

brandall10 wrote: post #218

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…

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…

Yes, I agree they're relying on post-hoc reasoning to justify their own place in the industry. All of the grade inflation stories about Ivy League and similar schools and personal experience in the industry with these types don't give me a lot of confidence in the present value of those school names if the dynamics of VC funding change a bit.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#395

Post by frob » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:25 PM UTC

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…

Sadly enough, I'm literally scoping out a new feature at the startup I work at that involves rationally splitting text into lines with a max length and buffers with a max line count so we can interface with a legacy system from the late-80s/early-90s

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#396

Post by Der_Einzige » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:29 PM UTC

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?

Guy who wrote apple homebrew got filtered and rejected by Google for not reversing a binary tree.

Apple homebrew is used by tens of millions of people daily.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#397

Post by dekhn » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:29 PM UTC

cadr wrote: post #387

dekhn wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only took 1 CS class in college- Cybernetics with Huffman. I failed! So clearly, that was a strong predictor for my future 12 year career at google (where I failed to do quicksort, or virtual ants problems). Nowadays I take a lot of extra time to come up with questions that aren't in leetcode, are easier than leetcode, and give far more signal than any leetcode would, for anything except for a 10X Staff Engineer.

Can you share what kind of things these are that give far more signal?

To be honest? every programmer needs to be able to pass FizzBuzz. Beyond that, I add some more basic work around byte representations of data (I have 4 symbols... how many bits do I need to encode a symbol?). I will typpically also include one major bug in a piece of code and ask the user to identify it (with hints).

I once interviewed a guy- a CTO at a biotech- and he wouldn't answer the question "I have a million DNA sequences and want to count the number of occurrences of each sequence" (could be hash table, could be any number of other solutions; he just balked and exited the interview).

Only if the person can get all that right would I even consider asking something more complicated.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#398

Post by dekhn » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:30 PM UTC

hnov wrote: post #379

dekhn wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 himse…

You need a full Santa exemption with business reason to use brew. The average person working on some server that deploys to borg does indeed use their Macbook as a thin client. Who's obtaining deps for their builds from brew? If you're building stuff on Mac, it's via bazel and all your deps are in source control.

I never said anybody is obtaining deps for builds- that's all UncleMeat.

At the time I used brew (5 years ago) it didn't require a santa exception with business justfication (and my justification would have been "I need this for my work"). Fortunately this wasn't really a problem for me any way as I don't even look at Mac machines as anything other than a thin client.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#399

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:31 PM UTC

ramesh31 wrote: post #295

lkrubner wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that companies are using leetcode tests for rational reasons goes against everything I've seen and experienced or read about. What I have seen, working at startups for more than 20 years, is irrational, self-destructive behavior, over and over and over again. I've worked with many entrepreneurs who have a few million dollars in the bank, and they have a great idea, but they self-destruct due to two big reaso…

Would love to talk about the dating app world. It's so funny how many founders come into it thinking their "revolutionary matching algorithm" or whatever is going to make the greatest dating app ever. Until you realize that the problem is human nature, and no one wants to be told who they should match with. People want a name, an age, and a face; that's it. And anything that gets in the way of that will lead to your…

[deleted]

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#400

Post by drugstorecowboy » Thu, Jun 09, 2022, 4:32 PM UTC

jboy55 wrote: post #359

jmvoodoo wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Perhaps there's another collectively shared work experience that also created leetcode style interviews. That is dealing with someone who has a degree, can speak well of what it takes to code, but who cannot code to save their life. I have known more than a dozen such "engineers". That's the reason you code during an interview, I think the emphasis on optimal O(N) is just a set of engineers who don't believe it shoul…

But.. why? Does that reflect anything close to the job they would be doing? Is handicapping someone in every way (You will google it for them), putting them on the spot in an already tense situation and expecting them to code while you watch the way that literally any software job works?

This is the insanity to me, "Here, do this contrived task that doesn't represent anything you will be doing... to prove that you can do the job"

I once had a whiteboard interview for a senior engineer position where they demanded that I write it in syntactically correct python, indentions and all, on the whiteboard. I'm trying to talk about code at a high level with them meanwhile they are deducting points because I assigned a dictionary key directly vs. using the dictonary's method. It turned me off to the company as a whole and the entire interview went downhill from there.