Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

fev.al

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

591–600 of 675 posts

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#591

Post by TulliusCicero »

deltree7 wrote: post #432
TulliusCicero wrote: post #426

Studies show that one of the most effective interviewing tools is a test for general mental ability: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-validity-and-utili... Now, IQ tests are of dubious legality, at least in the US, but algorithmic coding questions basically get you an IQ test crossed with a programming skill check: win-win. All the ire about how you don't actually invert binary trees or whatnot during your r…

Bingo! I like how all these arm-chair HNers who have never run a successful company or built a public-facing product used by millions suddenly are experts at how to build a successful company. Yeah, you know how Search serves 4 Billion people or people created Chrome or gmail in their 20% free time? Because they could leet code and not use Stack Overflow as a crutch. Sure, not all companies need leet code. But someon…

I don't think we really need to go that far.

But suffice to say, I think algorithmic interviews are a decent filtering tool for recruitment, and I haven't heard of anything better (though some other methods may be comparable for overall utility, but just measure different things).

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#592

Post by danaris »

visarga wrote: post #565
danaris wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you, like, read my second sentence at all? Whether you realize it or not, you're advocating for keeping people who aren't already mid-to-upper-middle-class (among others) out of these kinds of tech companies. Anything that's designed to make you work hard extra, outside of work to learn separate skills just to pass interviews is guaranteed to make it disproportionately harder for people who are, for whatever reas…

> designed to make you work hard extra, outside of work to learn separate skills just to pass interviews Ah, you're talking about those programming jobs that never require thinking about algorithms?

While I certainly wouldn't presume to claim that no programming jobs are remotely related to Leetcode—I'd be perfectly willing to believe that you, personally, have to engage mentally with "classic" algorithms on a daily basis—from everything I've read about them, I doubt very much that more than a minuscule fraction of programmers and other tech workers do anything on a day-to-day, or even month-to-month, basis that would be close enough to Leetcode that they could be considered similar skills.

I've been working as a programmer—largely PHP, Java, Objective-C, and Swift—for over 20 years now, and never, in my work, have I been asked to invert a binary tree, reverse a singly-linked list, or any similarly contrived scenario.

There's a huge difference between "thinking about algorithms" in the most general sense of that phrase (which means basically any programmer who does any of their own design work) and in the sense of the particular "algorithms" that we learned in CS classes and are featured in Leetcode problems.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#593

Post by pcan77 »

AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #24
padjo wrote: post #16

Just talk to the person, ask them about projects they’ve worked on, problems they’ve solved etc. you’ll learn far more about them that way than getting them to put on a dog and pony show at a whiteboard!

Talk to the person and you will (1) hear a lot of bullshit and (2) filter out a ton of good but not really silver-tongued candidates. P. S. I hate coding interviews.

this is 99% of interviews in literally every other field ever.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#594

Post by dilyevsky »

memonkey wrote: post #568
l33t2328 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, being able to understand and apply algorithms and data structures requires some intelligence. I know we try to stay away from the “we’re smarter than you” vibe here because it’s gross, but pretending leetcode style questions don’t require some degree of complex thought is absurd.

You can memorize a lot of them and forget everything in a year.

If enough people are doing it higher iq folks will bubble up in calibration

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#595

Post by dilyevsky »

weatherlite wrote: post #405
s17n wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More than obedience, it probably is the aspect that they're smart and determined to succeed. Yup that's what it's about! The problem with trying to test how good you are at the job is that you simply can't do it in a 1 hour (or even a 1 day) interview. You can however assess how smart somebody is, which is definitely correlated to job performance. It's also connected to growth potential - even if it were somehow po…

> You can however assess how smart somebody is Why not just give candidates a standard IQ test then? They are probably more reliable than Leetcode...

Bad optics

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#596

Post by dataangel »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #425

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 doubt it actually told you anything about their engineering culture. Companies with all sorts of different cultures are copy and pasting processes, there's no reason to expect it to be super representative of anything.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#597

Post by jen20 »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #396
hiq wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Nit: homebrew is not from Apple and is not even limited to Apple platforms.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#598

Post by jen20 »

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?

Because you can also install applications via homebrew. I use it for a few things, including installing bat, delta and other Rust coreutil replacements that I prefer. I absolutely do not use homebrew for project dependencies.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#599

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

spelunker wrote: post #523
jxramos wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a fascinating idea. Get companies to accept some form of standardized testing and have it be transferable. That would greatly increase the motivation behind its studies I would presume.

you could even call it certification!

Certification is generally binary, though - you're either certified or you're not. This might be a good thing though, as it establishes a decent floor for technical competency and can save everyone from having to deal with at least some of the technical interview nonsense.

What some of the people in these comments seem to want though is some sort of standardized score/ranking system, which I suspect might lead to even more nightmarish outcomes than the current leetcode-y interview processes. (e.g. Employers setting absurdly high cutoff scores, choosing one applicant over another because simply because they scored a couple points higher, applicants grinding unimaginable amounts of unpaid hours to bump up their scores a bit, etc.)

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#600

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

pyb wrote: post #327
moduspol wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be a fun social experiment if one of the big tech companies replaced the leetcode-style rounds with something arbitrary. Let's say: The "jumping jacks" round. You have to turn your webcam on and do 100 jumping jacks in 60 seconds. Only then will you potentially advance to the next round. The person watching on the other end can evaluate how far over 100 you got, whether or not your form matches best practice, an…

Have you heard of Amazon's "LP" interviews? It seems to be a little bit like that. The challenge there is to tell a number of well-rehearsed stories.

I get the sense that, because of Amazon's roots as a bookseller, they still like to optimize for people who are a bit more well-spoken and well-read, compared to other FAANGs. At the executive level, PowerPoint is banned and all meetings start by reading a well-composed multipage memo.

Being able to tell a great story might not be highly valued at most orgs, but I think it's part of Amazon's culture and something they desire in their skilled positions.

Post reply on HN