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Leetcode Considered Harmful
31–40 of 132 posts
Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful
#32Happily 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-c…
Well argued, but you didn't address the need for tests and/or certifications to prevent companies from being overwhelmed by a flood of unqualified candidates.
A doctor, lawyer, public accountant, and, well, many types of engineers obtain public or private certifications. As a result, it is much, much, much easier for hiring companies to find and interview qualified candidates.
I suppose, in the "old days" universities kind of, sort of, filled this role. A hiring manager looking at a resume might have said, "Oh, he's got an EE/CS from Berkeley, there's a good chance he's qualified.
Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful
#33I'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.
Even amongst the "top tier" companies, there are alternatives. Stripe essentially does pair programming on things you might actually do in your day job, using your own dev environment/etc.
That said, I'm partial to good leetcode questions. Some of them are worded terribly, some of them are essentially trivia, some of them are overly esoteric and not applicable to most roles. Some of them are great but have "optimal" solutions which take an absurd amount of research and effort to produce, like quickselect. These questions are bad and should not be asked.
Others I find fantastic questions. "Scheduling meetings", anything that requires you to walk a tree or do a binary search/BFS/DFS, and tasks that require you to combine two data structures like the "Hashmap with O(1) get random" question really helped me get better t my job.
There's others I'm lukewarm on, like many topological traversal, shortest/longest path, and knapsack/space filling questions. I personally love them and have gotten good at them, but I also don't expect joe schmo to remember how to implement the relevant algorithms off the top of their head. I'd consider this question cohort good for "open book" interviewing at "less prestigious" companies. I'm totally fine with Google/Meta/Amazon asking these closed-book for normal roles.
Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...?
Chrome, Edge, Angular, Android, Windows, iOS, OSX, VS Code, …
Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful
#35I'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.
Simply having them work through a basic problem out loud as they code it with a decent engineer that understands the problem is much better than Leetcode.
Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful
#36While 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 l…
#2 is fun. I might use it in the future. Thanks!
Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful
#37Happily 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-c…
Well argued, but you didn't address the need for tests and/or certifications to prevent companies from being overwhelmed by a flood of unqualified candidates. A doctor, lawyer, public accountant, and, well, many types of engineers obtain public or private certifications. As a result, it is much, much, much easier for hiring companies to find and interview qualified candidates. I suppose, in the "old days" universitie…
That's because programming is nothing like any of those professions. How many certificates do you see for musicians, painters, photographers? Programming as at least as much an art as it is anything else and art is very hard to quantify in the types of tests that most certificate systems use. It requires a project based certificate which needs more organization that exists today. IMO it'd require a guild like setup that I don't see happening anytime soon.
Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful
#38Happily 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-c…
Well argued, but you didn't address the need for tests and/or certifications to prevent companies from being overwhelmed by a flood of unqualified candidates. A doctor, lawyer, public accountant, and, well, many types of engineers obtain public or private certifications. As a result, it is much, much, much easier for hiring companies to find and interview qualified candidates. I suppose, in the "old days" universitie…
Agreed. That's what LC is filling these days. It's a kind of "qualification" in an unregulated industry. The doctor has the MD, the lawyer a JD, public accountant CPA, etc. There is no base minimum that a software engineer is required to have. Even tradesmen are required to be licensed which follows some certification.
The other aspect I would mention is that the LC style interview has made it possible for a candidate not to bother about their relationships with their existing employer. It is not so for other professions. A doctors career can be nuked by unfavorable recommendations by their existing employer.
This is what every "I don't like LC / LC is harmful" post doesn't address. - How do you certify? (and no, a profile of github projects doesn't count) - How do you make the candidate free of any obligation to his current employer? LC interviews are the symptom, not the cause.
Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Linux kernel is not MANGA
Otherwise could you tell us what you meant.
Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful
#40Happily 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-c…
Well argued, but you didn't address the need for tests and/or certifications to prevent companies from being overwhelmed by a flood of unqualified candidates. A doctor, lawyer, public accountant, and, well, many types of engineers obtain public or private certifications. As a result, it is much, much, much easier for hiring companies to find and interview qualified candidates. I suppose, in the "old days" universitie…
Before the Web, we were paid like accountants and job hopping was frowned on, so nobody was highly motivated to scam his way into a brief stint he wasn’t qualified for.