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

601–610 of 675 posts

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#601

Post by wyclif »

jxramos wrote: post #503
corrral wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> leetcode is the SAT for coding, not perfect, but at least it's close to fair play. It would be amazing if leetcode were like the SAT, and you could just get one good score and then never think about it again. Anything like that would make it much lower-friction to switch between FAANGs (and friends), though, which I suspect is a big part of why they've settled on doing things this way.

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.

Sure it's a great idea and hiring culture would be so much better if it happened, but I think the parent is correct that companies want friction at that point. None of them want to make it easier for talent to jump ship and transfer.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#602

Post by jrjarrett »

tru3_power wrote: post #323

As someone who just went through this (finished up loop at fb and google) - I can honestly say at first I HATED the idea of leetcoding/having to learn this stuff, but after a while I started actually learning the real concepts behind the problems and started looking at them like puzzles. I enjoy puzzles so this approach made these problems more approachable and engaging.

When do/did you have time to study LeetCode? After a day’s work at my actual job, I’m done. My brain is fried. Writing more code is the last thing I want to do.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#603

Post by aidaman »

UncleMeat wrote: post #139
pojzon wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of creator of „brew” who got declined by Google because he couldnt write a reverse binary tree search in 1h. Dont mind that half of Google is using his work for free.

That wasn’t actually true. He later said that he wasn’t asked to invert a binary tree. Also, nobody at google is using homebrew for work.

what in the world does that have to do with whether he was qualified to work for google? the average developer at google is definitely a much much less proficient programmer than the creator of homebrew.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#604

Post by jboy55 »

visarga wrote: post #557
hereyougo wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here you go # You have a music player that should be playing a 900 song list randomly. # You notice that you keep hearing a song being repeated during your drive and # you are curious if its truly random. from collections import Counter import random r = random.Random() songs = range(1,900) unplayed = set(songs) # You also keep hitting skip in the hopes a particular song comes up. # Write a piece of code that simulat…

I'm wondering why would the music player implement sampling with replacement and not without replacement? Sampling without replacement would shuffle the list and then play the tracks in shuffled order, no repeats until all songs are played once.

This is what I was thinking, as I was driving in, and heard the same song. It was an iPhone, and it was my impression that this is how the iPhone worked. Now, my iPhone did something else weird, it randomly dropped songs from being downloaded, so songs 'disappeared'.

One other thing, I just got a new car, and this was the first time I was using 'next' using bluetooth. So, as I was driving in, I was in my head trying to figure out whether the phone now only had 100 songs downloaded, or whether this bluetooth 'next' function on shuffle was picking a random song from the list, rather than 'next' on a shuffled list.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#605

Post by jboy55 »

hereyougo wrote: post #534
jboy55 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Here you go # You have a music player that should be playing a 900 song list randomly. # You notice that you keep hearing a song being repeated during your drive and # you are curious if its truly random. from collections import Counter import random r = random.Random() songs = range(1,900) unplayed = set(songs) # You also keep hitting skip in the hopes a particular song comes up. # Write a piece of code that simulat…

That would have been perfect. That's what I would have wanted checked in. I would have quickly turned to telling you how awesome the company was.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#606

Post by mannanj »

I still don’t understand why more companies don’t do interviews that include solving real problems that their engineers have had to solve (or will solve), modified by some or more of the following factors: 1) domain specific knowledge removed so someone without company proprietary data can grasp it in an interview 2) code setup, library installation, all the time consuming fat removed 3) some level of repeatability and possible algorithm space so different candidates strengths can shine.

How hard would this be to do?

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#607

Post by avgDev »

redisman wrote: post #371
moduspol wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going through job interviews now (not with Amazon, but others). The whole thing feels like well-rehearsed regurgitation. Well, and a smidge of acting, obviously, because you don't want it to come off as well-rehearsed. But they know exactly what they want to hear and you're competing with other candidates who see the same writing on the wall and are doing their own rehearsals. I thought it was just the leetcode,…

No it’s totally right. Going in cold is basically impossible. You have to be ready to regurgitate leetcode answers, “approved” system designs, STAR stories about your career that show various BS story arcs. And of course pretend like you’re not just regurgitating for… reasons. It’s all a bizarre cargo cult acting session at this point. Big companies even send you a study guide these days ffs

Amazon sent me a study guide......I told the recruiter I'm going to pass.

Until, I don't have a job I'm not grinding leetcode. I also dislike people who refer to themselves as ex-faang. I really don't care.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#608

Post by foobiekr »

adregan wrote: post #589
foobiekr wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The variant of fizzbuzz that I use is "read and categorize a line at a time from stdin." You'd be amazed how this one small change makes the discussion quite different.

In your variant do the integers increase in order? Also is the input always integers or is there some “junk” mixed in?

It doesn't even matter, but sometimes I ask them to do a sliding window de-dupe.

A surprising number of people have a lot of trouble with the reading loop/termination condition.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#609

Post by nowherebeen »

dilyevsky wrote: post #594
memonkey wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Which at the end of the day still doesn't test that you can do the job.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#610

Post by arcanus »

dekhn wrote: post #539
astrange wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do PhD defenses actually involve asking random tech questions instead of what's in the dissertation? Seems like if they're going to fail that, you already have bigger problems.

My PhD was in biophysics and the questions ranged widely outside my dissertation (in my case, you actually do a defense to proceed to work on your PhD, then write your dissertation and give a final talk; there's no way, unless your advisor rejects your dissertation, that your phd wouldn't be awarded. Other programs rear-load the process and have a real "defense" at the end, which is crazy if you think about it. At on…

This sounds like the qualifying examination.

In my phd experience in the USA we had oral qualifying examinations which involved whiteboard derivations. The thesis defense after writing was really mostly focused on probing the results in the thesis.

Post reply on HN