471–480 of 675 posts
Without the ability to get hired by just "being good at leetcode," does that make it harder for people to break into the industry?
Needless to say I stopped the interviewer when they started asking Leet code questions and have refused to do any of Leet code interviews since.
Life and fun code and fun design is way to short to waste it on ineffective BS.
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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…
People just want to meet attractive people, compatibility be damned.
I'm glad I met my wife in 2010 before online dating became an utter cess pit.
I'm sure interviewing can be improved, but I think it's worth remembering that we are one of the few industries that actually tries to do skills-based interviewing. When people say "get rid of leetcode" or what not, are they really saying that the alternative that the rest of the world uses (resume screen plus vibes check) is preferable?
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Exactly. I honestly think no one is entitled more than software developers. Not even that chick from Mean Girls. Hell which other similarly paying field can you double compensation in like three or four months. Six months if you are slow or have a demanding life. Lawyers? Hahahaha. Doctor? Hahahaha. At least with LC there is an end goal. Those 75 questions. Or well I think 150 questions. I hate LC personally but also…
At least with those professions you have one test you pass, and maybe you retake it once every few years to renew your credentials. With Leetcode, you have to retake the test multiple times every few years when you change jobs for each company you apply to. Leetcode would be a lot more tolerable if it was administered more like the bar exam or like medical exams. Whatever happened to DRY?
Which means... Always. Be. Leetcoding. Do the bare minimum at your job and then do LC the rest of the time. Because your job is just your job, but your career is LC. These companies don't yet realize they are optimizing for mercenaries that have no loyalty to the code nor the company.
On a slight tangent, some of the people over on Blind would sell their own mother for a tiny bump in TC. That mentality used to be limited to Wall St. or maybe Big 4 accounting firms, etc. But now it's the whole tech industry. I remember having a software job was a lot more fun, back around 2007ish. That culture is so foreign to me now.
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…
Probably the same people who think JIRA is a great project management tool :>) - when in fact, it (JIRA/Leetcode) gets used a lot, because it gets used a lot by other people - and for no other good reason.
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The tests aren't testing for competency at the job, and after a decade of experience writing software you have long ago realized that party tricks and cute algorithms are a fairly rare part of the job (generalizing here of course), so you stop thinking about them as much and get out of practice. When they do show up, you certainly don't have to do them in 10 minutes, and I think everyone would rather you didn't anywa…
>write a robust solution rather than a clever one but why must it be mutually exclusive? Are you implying all "robust" solutions, whatever that means, are dumb? Surely you put some thought in it to make it "robust"?
For example, storing some flag in the high bits of a pointer field of a struct is a "clever" solution, whereas having a separate bool field is a "dumb" solution. In most cases, the "dumb" solution is much more robust over time (less likely to cause bugs as the code changes and is modified by various people). Of course, the "clever" solution is necessary in some situations (very constrained environment, critical infrastructure such as an object header used for every type etc), but should often be avoided if possible.
What's important is that the way this is often presented is that more experienced people will prefer "dumber" solutions, as experience often shows that long-time maintainability trumps many small losses of efficiency. So using "clever" and "dumb" in this way is not at all intended to put down the engineer writing the more robust version.
I just tell recruiters I simply won't. Turned down continuing with an interview process with a company just last week for this reason. I'll do take-home programming, I'll do collaborative debugging and coding in a shared IDE with something that looks like a real project, I'll do system design etc. interviews, talk to you about programming, etc. and I'll show you my GitHub etc. projects and you can judge from that, an…
I've done the same - and got hired anyway after I told the recruiter was not interested in taking any tests - just happened to have the right in-demand skills at the right time I guess.
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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.
The rigor of an intro level algorithms course at a serious school far exceeds what is expected in a FAANG Leetcode interview.
Instead in my day to day I'm able to recognize when a problem needs something beyond the braindead solution and a sense of roughly where the solution lies, and am able to then go do a bit of research on the topic.
Solving leetcode hard style problems in ~45 mins off the top of one's head is just not a problem many developers face in their jobs. I agree that these tests demonstrate some information, but the ability for that person to be a good developer is not among that signal.
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…
The average college graduate makes ~60k out of school. The median law school new grad makes ~80k. Yet a large group on Hacker News acts like anyone who studies enough to get into a FAANG company fell for some horrible scam. I've studied less than 200 hours in my life and now make ~320k and expect to get ~450k when I switch jobs later this year (both remote)– I have only a high school diploma. Chalk me up as another v…
Hope that adds some perspective to things. (I'm not trying to justify the extent of some responses, just let you know my take.)