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Leetcode Considered Harmful

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Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#11

Post by moomoo11 »

Honestly I think leetcode should be reserved for the jobs where you build the Lego bricks (the MANGAs).

Anywhere else where you use the Lego bricks to build some applications shouldn’t really use leetcode.

If you’re a good product engineer and you enjoy building good products, maybe you should start a company to build good products that solve problems for other people. Let the engineers who enjoy building the bricks do leetcode in peace so that we have solid pieces to build good software.

I’m doing the latter and trying to build a company. I realized I much prefer to build products that customers love, and I want to build useful software for people. I’m not that interested in low level tinkering and re-inventing the wheel all the time.

Coexistence is possible!

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#12

Post by porcoda »

Happily employed and had no trouble with coding interviews myself. So my opinion isn’t from some personal angst about passing this bar: I found it easy.

That said: I’m tired of the attitude that there is no effective alternative to this style of interview. You do know we hired people to do engineering jobs for many decades before the industry started cargo culting what they observed a handful of Silicon Valley mega-companies doing. Plenty of very competent people were interviewed and hired before this “relive your algorithms class final on a whiteboard” style interview process became the thing to do.

These interview processes are not the only way. As I said: it’s cargo culting where insignificant companies try to act like Google or some other giant in hopes that perhaps the billions in revenue will start rolling in if they mimic them. To me this behavior is no different than “founders” who adopted dress styles and presentation mannerisms imitating Steve Jobs a decade or so ago. …And bloggers who can’t resist the “considered harmful” trope.

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#13

Post by jasonboyd »

elcomet wrote: post #9
teg4n_ wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I much prefer take home projects relevant to the job I would be performing than leetcode style puzzles. I dislike leetcode style puzzles so much that I will simply drop out of the interview loop rather than subject myself to them.

Please no. I don't want to work 10 hours on some project for free.

That is one way to look at it I guess. But if it means a substantial pay raise then the amortized cost of those hours is negligible.

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#14

Post by matthewmacleod »

urthor wrote: post #4

I've never heard of an effective alternative to Leetcode though. We're engineers. If you don't like something, make something better. Take home projects and how many marbles in a jar are extraordinarily worse than traversing a binary tree. I suspect that any interviewing practice will always being in detractors. It's a process of culling, those culled will dislike it.

Literally any other process is better, in my experience. Short take-home exercises. A system design exercise around a whiteboard. Talking the interviewer through some previously-written or open-source code. Pairing up to fix a bug in the org’s code during the interview.

Leetcode-style problems as an interview technique are probably the one that’s furthest away from testing the from day-to-day software development challenges most organisations face.

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#15

Post by [deleted] »

tokyolights wrote: post #8

While I'm not in favor of LeetCode-style interviews, I recently had a fairly pleasant interview process with a company that used these coding challenges. The twist was that they were all camouflaged as scenarios that resemble their own business, instead of some random unrelated concept. I found that their effort to make the questions look relevant made it much more pleasant for me to actually feel engaged and solve t…

[deleted]

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#16

Post by valbaca »

tokyolights wrote: post #8

While I'm not in favor of LeetCode-style interviews, I recently had a fairly pleasant interview process with a company that used these coding challenges. The twist was that they were all camouflaged as scenarios that resemble their own business, instead of some random unrelated concept. I found that their effort to make the questions look relevant made it much more pleasant for me to actually feel engaged and solve t…

That's exactly how I frame my technical interviews as well. I only pick questions which I could tie to an actual, real-world problem that we've had.

A couple for example:

1. Given a set of number ranges (e.g. [1..3, 4..5, 9..20, 2..5]) consolidate them. Tying this to a real world scenario: we had a system that dealt with "time periods" and we needed to write a validator to ensure all future dates were covered by at least one configured "time period." One of the first steps to do this was basically the number-range consolidation.

2. Given a list of numbers output metrics like average, min, max, and mode. Now what if the list doesn't fit in memory and instead comes in as a stream (or from an iterator)? This one was inspired by an intern that got stuck when he needed to run calculations on data that didn't fit into memory. He was seriously about to request a host with 10+TB of memory before we stopped him.

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#17

Post by 5350-uiop-1130 »

maybe leetcode had some value before. way for certain type of person to evaluate their social peers in an interview.

now there are leetcode grinding courses and books, it no longer serve any purpose than to dissuade those who don't have time, or motivation.

good way to identify the desperate willing for a small % chance in an 8 stage interview when someone may still reject you for some unknown reason.

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#18

Post by whateveracct »

moomoo11 wrote: post #11

Honestly I think leetcode should be reserved for the jobs where you build the Lego bricks (the MANGAs). Anywhere else where you use the Lego bricks to build some applications shouldn’t really use leetcode. If you’re a good product engineer and you enjoy building good products, maybe you should start a company to build good products that solve problems for other people. Let the engineers who enjoy building the bricks…

MANGA has built (or even contributed to in passing) basically 0 of the tools I use in production...

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#19

Post by the_only_law »

whateveracct wrote: post #18
moomoo11 wrote: post #11

Honestly I think leetcode should be reserved for the jobs where you build the Lego bricks (the MANGAs). Anywhere else where you use the Lego bricks to build some applications shouldn’t really use leetcode. If you’re a good product engineer and you enjoy building good products, maybe you should start a company to build good products that solve problems for other people. Let the engineers who enjoy building the bricks…

MANGA has built (or even contributed to in passing) basically 0 of the tools I use in production...

They've built plenty of stuff I use everyday, it's just that most of it is going to make me blow an aneurysm some day.

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#20

Post by throwyawayyyy »

I'm unpersuaded. To begin with, _is_ it such a waste of time to study programming problems, as, you know, a programmer?

Also, more specifically on this piece: can anyone explain how Theranos fits in here? I don't get the connection. One the one hand we have a massive fraud, and on the other... people studying techniques that are rarely used by normal software engineers? But that nevertheless are, still, programming techniques.

And please no more "considered harmful" titles! It's painful to read at this point.

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