Leetcode Considered Harmful • Hacker News Board

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#21

Post by Dirak » Tue, Jun 28, 2022, 6:37 AM UTC

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...

Besides Pytorch, Tensorflow, gRPC, React, AWS, Kubernetes, GraphQL, C++ Swiss table, etc...?

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#22

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jun 28, 2022, 6:40 AM UTC

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...

[deleted]

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#23

Post by axlprose » Tue, Jun 28, 2022, 6:41 AM UTC

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.

When taking into account the total amount of time involved in a traditional multi-round interview process (which can potentially go on for months depending on the company), the travel time required for any in-person interview rounds, and the time spent practicing leetcode drills in preparation for these interviews, 10 hours is nothing.

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#24

Post by hughesjj » Tue, Jun 28, 2022, 6:43 AM UTC

throwyawayyyy wrote: post #20

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 t…

The "considered harmful" essay jumped the shark and got meta the better part of a decade ago, yet here we are...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744916

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#25

Post by weq » Tue, Jun 28, 2022, 6:43 AM UTC

There is a subset of the community use l33tcode as an employeer screening process, so please, dont shout this stuff too loudly.

If you wernt such an evil company you wouldnt need to pay people so much money to work on your ad data scam.

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#26

Post by pengaru » Tue, Jun 28, 2022, 6:44 AM UTC

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...

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

Is the linux kernel a tool you use in production?

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#27

Post by lbrito » Tue, Jun 28, 2022, 6:47 AM UTC

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.

Leetcode: weeks or months spent grinding daily, adding easily up to 100s of hours

Take home project: typically capped at 4 hours.

Hmmm, this is a tough one...

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#28

Post by texaslonghorn5 » Tue, Jun 28, 2022, 6:49 AM UTC

It seems like this interview glosses over the differences in hiring senior junior and student intern engineers. Or maybe I missed it, please enlighten.

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#29

Post by greenpeas » Tue, Jun 28, 2022, 6:49 AM UTC

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...

The Chrome browser and various protocols (SPDY/HTTP2 and others though I need to do some research to know exactly which ones). They've also invested a lot in optimizing the JS engine. The Go language, so indirectly contributed to any tool built in Go.

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#30

Post by axlprose » Tue, Jun 28, 2022, 6:51 AM UTC

ivolimmen wrote: post #3

booboofixer wrote: post #2

I took the pill (what color were you supposed to take again?). I'm prepping for the leetcode interviews. If my opinion counts for anything, don't change the interview format now. How will i get my time back that I've spent learning how to use hashmaps with java-specific syntax? My notebooks full of pseudocode are waiting to be converted into a leetcode-time-limit friendly programming language. Dont tell me it's actua…

It is: taking the red pill. That also happens to be a good book.

Begrudgingly accepting the mainstream way of doing things sounds a bit more in line with the blue pill than the red pill to me, idk. Though I guess realizing the silliness of the whole situation would give it a bit of a purplish tint maybe.