the writer forgot to say they discriminate against those who can't (or don't want to) practice leetcode questions in their free time. This includes those with families, caretakers, people with after work hobbies, etc.
Stop Interviewing with Leet Code
511–520 of 675 posts
Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code
#512I'd kill for the industry to progress in this area. Really enjoyed when I interviewed at Netflix that they didnt put me through it as a manager. It was all about cross partner collaboration, working with and coaching devs, technical design/vision and handling customer/vendor relationships.
Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code
#513Don'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…
Any hiring process will necessarily filter out a large percentage of qualified candidates so it's not a major concern. If I'm hiring for X positions, and there are X + Y qualified candidates, then any hiring process whatsoever will necessarily have to filter out at a minimum Y candidates, and usually Y will be much much greater than X.
The problem is that the total number of candidates who apply for the position, Z, is significantly higher than X + Y by a very very large margin, and I mean orders and orders of magnitude. For every position I post I get on the order of 600-1000 applicants in a matter of a week, even though I'm only looking to hire maybe 2-3 people. Of those 1000 applicants, 80% of them are simply unqualified, and that's being really really generous just for the sake of argument (I'd wager the figure is closer to 90-95%). So once again just for the sake of argument that means 200 of them are qualified, and I'm hiring three, which means any process I choose whatsoever will filter out a minimum of 197 out of the 200 qualified people, no matter what I do.
Given that calculus, it's better for me to focus on making sure that I filter out the 800 people who are simply unqualified for the position even if that means I end up filtering some of the 200 good developers, because I have no choice but to filter out at least 197 of the good developers anyways no matter what, whereas I do have a choice about filtering out the 800 bad ones.
Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code
#514Earlier quoted context omitted.
You won't get the job not because you "didn't worry about the algorithm" but because you didn't ask any questions about the problem; just went straightforward to the implementation. In FAANG interviews that would be a red flag.
In the FAANG interviews I've done you're never allowed to ask questions...? Maybe for clarification of the problem space, but not about the algorithm or the promise of a particular solution.
If I'm the interviewer and you don't ask questions I'm going to rate you very low on your communications skills. You may have the best algorithm in your head and write the most elegant code, but working at a company requires you to communicate your ideas and plans and code and everything else to your team. And no, communicating only at the end (code review time) is not enough. This is not a school assignment that you silently write and then turn in for a grade.
The best interviews I've experienced, both as an interviewer and an interviewee, are the ones that feel like two team members collaborating to narrow down requirements and solve a problem.
> about the algorithm or the promise of a particular solution
It's not about "the" algorithm or "a" solution. It's about you the candidate being able to propose multiple solutions, perhaps with space-time tradeoffs, to provide a recommendation based on your judgement, and to ask the interviewer what they think of your proposal.
Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code
#515You know after going through like 10 or so interviews this year while trying to find a new job, I grew to appreciate leetcode tests as a candidate more. The first thing you start to realize when interviewing is that every company has their own unique process for interviewing. The second thing you realize is that you're not going to ace every process every time, it's a roulette wheel you're spinning to see if this spe…
It's quite true that companies that don't do Leetcode may not necessarily be more challenging to get into, but it is more random whether you will. And you often need to study especially for that one company, who may ask you, a backend developer, to do a pair coding exercise to implement a RESTful web API, even hiring for a backend position.
I try not to be a part of the problem when I'm the interviewer, giving a problem that would be described as a Leetcode easy, with an optimal implementation that is below easy. But I want to see if the candidate can understand the problem, the big picture, talk about tradeoffs in the problem, properly analyze performance, properly test their code, etc. Most candidates struggle with this, many can't even code a working solution, and this is the talent pool for a "top-tier" software company.
Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code
#516Earlier quoted context omitted.
IQ does not tell determination/hard-working-attitude at all, in fact many with high IQ ended up being nobody, as high IQ makes learning relatively easier, most got used to that and just let the 'grit' go. leetcode is the SAT for coding, not perfect, but at least it's close to fair play.
> IQ does not tell determination/hard-working-attitude this is what everyone said a college degree was for. Or experience. Neither of which matter when a senior dev with 10 years of experience and two kids still has to find an hour or two a day for three months in a row to grind out textbook algorithms to fake problems. Just to switch their fucking job. Thanks to cargo-cult insanity, god help those stuck in miserable…
To be fair, most are real problems, just phrased in a contrived way.
Yes, they're rarely encountered in most day-to-day jobs. But that doesn't make them fake...
Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code
#517Considering 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…
Do you mind saying what kind of role you are switching to and from?
Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code
#518All 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…
>an exercise left to the reader
So it turns out that startups also want a culture of meaningless and arbitrary brainteasers instead of building cool shit that works?
Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code
#519Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disagree. I’ve interviewed quite a few people who are prepping and are senior. Even for those who have been at FAANG before - it’s common to spend multiple months prepping nights and weekends. Taking a full two months off just to study is uncommon. But if you think just doing an hour a day is sufficient - you’re wrong. Most candidates (even senior ones) fail with that level of studying. I know because I’ve talked to…
I knew someone who basically contributed nothing at my company and spent most of his days studying LC. He got an offer and left. I wonder if he is still playing the system or if they are getting any work out of him.
You knew Jeff too?
I'm at the new company and I can confirm that's what he is still doing.
Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code
#520I 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…
Yeah, leetcode type of test got popular because hugely successful Microsoft and Google used to use them to pick the smartest geeks for amazing technical challenges for their times. Now that leetcode is being abused by both companies and candidates, we really should find a different way to interview.