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Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

fev.al

651–660 of 675 posts

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#651

that's an engineer's opinion about things beyond his understanding 75% of fresh grads are below mediocre, to put it very mildly. 50% of candidates with a seemingly OK employment record or portfolio are too. leetcode filters them out right away. that's the purpose it serves. it's not there to get you good candidates, it's there to make sure that you only spend time interviewing potentially good candidates. I would agr…

... and as a result there are false negatives and you turn away actual top talent who can't Leetcode.

Effort spent on hiring process is reflected in quality of employees.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#652
post #526

I don't know, risky answer but I will give it nonetheless. This advice is given to many candidates, and I agree that Leet Code interviewing is bad and the industry needs to work on something better, but in the meantime, if you are starting out, think of it this way (and I have friends younger by 10 years or so and straight out of college and I say the same thing), a few months of studying gives you a huge salary. It'…

There are a whole slew of Stockholm Syndrome answers here that effectively repeat the precise point you make.

If it gets you the 6 figure salary, who cares about the corrosive bad practice remaining prevalent?

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#653
post #359

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…

This fear of hiring inept people kind of surprises me. Can't they just let people go who interview very well but are poor performers on the job? If they don't care to follow up on the performance of new hires, I have to wonder if it really matters one way or the other.

I'm outside any major metro area, when we've needed to hire there haven only been a handful of people responding. When people come in for an interview it's been pretty easy to tell if they really can't code at all without making them actually code. I haven't found this to be challenging.

I suspect the issue is interviewing a large number of people in a short period of time. If you don't have 45 minutes or so to spend on each person, using automated leetcode style problems probably starts to seem like a pretty attractive way to weed people out.

Lastly, usually one or two people from my team would take part in interviews. If there aren't any developers available at interview time (i.e., it's a manager and a someone from HR), I can start to see how people without any real coding experience can make it through the process. Again, this is probably a place where automated testing looks like a reasonable solution.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#654
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…

This fear of hiring inept people kind of surprises me. Can't they just let people go who interview very well but are poor performers on the job? If they don't care to follow up on the performance of new hires, I have to wonder if it really matters one way or the other. I'm outside any major metro area, when we've needed to hire there haven only been a handful of people responding. When people come in for an interview…

> Can't they just let people go who interview very well but are poor performers on the job?

Eventually, yes. But it takes time for them to start, time and money to onboard them, evaluate how they’re ramping up, then if not acceptable, to follow whatever performance management process is indicated by the company and local law, then transition whatever work they were doing. This could be several months and tens of thousands of dollars just to get back to a worse state than when you walked into interview that candidate.

Interviewing even slightly better than last year can pay large dividends.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#655

that's an engineer's opinion about things beyond his understanding 75% of fresh grads are below mediocre, to put it very mildly. 50% of candidates with a seemingly OK employment record or portfolio are too. leetcode filters them out right away. that's the purpose it serves. it's not there to get you good candidates, it's there to make sure that you only spend time interviewing potentially good candidates. I would agr…

... and as a result there are false negatives and you turn away actual top talent who can't Leetcode. Effort spent on hiring process is reflected in quality of employees.

top talent gets hired outright, based on their prior work

potential top talent might get turned away yeah - if they can't leetcode and have nothing impressive on their resume, but that's acceptable

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with all of those things. A real engineer has soft skills and the ability to look beyond the immediate problem to see what is at the heart of the issue. They can see the effects of a solution and see the problems that might arise from it. They see connections. Leetcoders just find the most efficient solution for the problem at hand. They don't see connections to other problems, whether current or potential. T…

You don't want to be a real engineer in business though. Real engineers do all of the hard work and thinking while getting paid less than management.

I've done management. It's mind-numbing and soul-sucking. I'll take the pay cut to have the stimulation and challenge of being an engineer.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#657
post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is true that this was the problem with the brew author. Homebrew being part of the typical Google workflow is entirely independent of the situation. But, as usual for internet discussions, it is fun to rathole on side conversations.

The best part is, I was defending the use of homebrew (which I absolutely hate) and local development (which is far inferior, IMHO, to blaze/forge/citc/piper). I had really hoped releasing abseil/bazel would help but sadly, it was done too little, too late.

How are those tools better than for example plain old mvn or gradle ?

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yup. That's why Tinder won over OKCupid. 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.

[deleted]

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#659
This is very similar to my process and I've found it to be very effective. We hire engineers to work with a well known dynamic language's MVC-ish framework building a pretty standard fare web platform.

We tell candidates they can look things up on the condition they tell us when they are doing so (basically, "think out loud and walk us through the process -- knowing where to find answers is a valuable skill!") And in most cases they're permitted to use pseudocode if they want to, e.g., if the situation demands any kind of obscure syntax or boilerplate, they just have to note it.

Exercise 1

All candidates are shown some (poorly written) code and asked to pretend they're performing a code review for the author, who we describe as a novice programmer who is new to the language & framework. The code we use is a composite of real code pulled from many places in our system (basically, what the code would look like if all the mistakes we encounter were collected into one snippet). The functionality it implements is exactly the kind of functionality the candidate will be expected to implement on a daily basis.

We ask them to identify antipatterns, suggest edits to make the code more idiomatic, discover bugs, point out security or performance flaws, improve names, etc, and reassure them by telling them that no one spots all of the issues.

We're causal in demeanor and try really hard to remove stress from the situation, making jokes, etc. We help them if they get stuck.

Exercise 2

We share a 90% working piece of code that is missing a single method. Without getting too detailed, something like "This will setup a form based on this model, but the way it is written right now does not provide a mechanism for allowing the options of the select box to depend upon which user is signed in. What would you change to enable that?" They don't even have to write the code (though they often do), they just need to understand conceptually why it doesn't work and then talk through a solution.

Exercise 3

A very simple test of their ORM knowledge. They need to utilize a technique that they'll have used dozens of times if they are being honest about their experience but that they probably wouldn't learn in the most basic of tutorials.

..And so on.

For candidates applying for senior roles we have an additional live-coding exercise, but most of the same rules apply -- they can look up docs, we help them if they get stuck, etc. We give them a starting skeleton app and they have more than enough time to solve the problem. They can use their own editor, copy/paste sample code they find on stackoverflow or in docs, etc -- basically everything they do when they are actually coding.

The problem is a very realistic one -- a simplified version of a feature that had at one time been on our roadmap but which we eventually abandoned. We encourage them to add comments to indicate what they'd do if they had more time, and when they're done, we discuss the overall approach and ask questions about their decisions.

I've found the above approach to work far, far better than any "whiteboard coding" or "leetcode"-style unrealistic (for the places I've worked and the roles I hire for) interview problems. We rarely regret hires and people stick around for a (shockingly) long time.

I really wish other tech decision makers would adopt this style, for their own sake and for the sake of those seeking jobs.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell if you are being facetious or not. I hope you are being facetious. I really do. As many other comments have indicated right here on Hacker News, professional licenses are commonplace for occupations such as plumbers, electricians, doctors, lawyers, and even many types of engineers. I suppose that central governments (such as the US federal government) should offer licenses for myriad types of software en…

Nice rant. It’s full of logical holes, of course, as there’s no common definition of tech roles and their titles, let alone a common understanding of the included tasks. There are React Boot Camp folks who can whip up a frontend in no time who are arguably more competent at this task than a PhD in Comp Sci, and there are PhDs in Comp Sci who never wrote a lick of code in their life. Technology in software IS Politica…

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