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Leetcode Considered Harmful

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Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#41

Post by hughesjj »

Jistern wrote: post #32
porcoda wrote: post #12

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-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…

Leetcode was created in part to be more equitable and objective.

Before leetcode, we had people asking puzzles which had nothing to do with your coding abilities, like "How many balls could fit on a Boeing 747" or "If you have 9 balls, a see-saw, and one ball weighs more/less than the others, what is the minimum number of weighings to find said ball".

Alma matter also used to matter a bunch more, and non-traditional schooling devs were much harder to come by.

Leetcode isn't perfect, but it's better than what we had before. That said, I don't think it's the "final form" or optimal template for interviewing. What I would love to see are more constructive suggestions for objectively evaluating candidates that don't devolve into things easily bullshitable or biased.

I don't think the certificate days would be much use today, given how fast frameworks change and just how many different technologies are involved with modern development.

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#42

Post by hughesjj »

eikenberry wrote: post #37
Jistern wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

The worst part is we often can't share our artistic work with future employers due to IP concerns.

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#44

Post by carlmr »

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…

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

Me too, I've worked in teams without coding interviews, and they hired a lot more subpar engineers that made everybody's life harder.

If I interview I don't put so much emphasis on syntax or the algorithm itself, but whether people can tell me how the algorithms basically work and when to use them.

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#45

Post by rbanffy »

valbaca wrote: post #16
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 l…

On 2, to be fair, 10 TB of RAM is not that outlandish. That’s a fraction of what fits in a modern mainframe.

I’d love to have an excuse to get a machine like that.

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#46

Post by Quikinterp »

hughesjj wrote: post #42
eikenberry wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

The worst part is we often can't share our artistic work with future employers due to IP concerns.

When so much of my resume is NDA'd it really starts to feel like "I'm a great painter, I promise, I'm just not allowed to show you any art I've made"

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#47

Post by hughesjj »

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.

10 hours on some project per interview

Like interviews aren't lengthy enough as-is. I had an onsite the other week with two sys design, two leetcode-esque, a hiring manager, and a project manager.

I'd take that any day over the take home project I had to do in a subset of common LISP fresh out of college. Twas NOT a fun weekend, especially since I had no familiarity with LISP. With few exceptions, I don't do takehomes anymore. I don't want to spend an hour or so fuddling with your/your vendor's poorly documented, buggy environment (or setting it up myself) on my own time, outside of office hours, talking to exactly zero human beings during the actual process. It teaches me nothing about the company or team I'd be working on, doesn't allow for any gauge of culture fit, and (unlike leetcode) doesn't make me a better programmer.

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#48

Post by MaxBarraclough »

eikenberry wrote: post #37
Jistern wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Various non-software engineering disciplines implement chartered engineer schemes. I imagine there's an element of artistry there too, but they seem to cope.

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#49

Post by neuronic »

eikenberry wrote: post #37
Jistern wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Especially since the entire industry is constantly hiking on the St. James to find its inner self. Philosophies change and we notice tidbits that are good, tidbits that are bad and keep changing and renewing...

Almost like fashion. At least in Europe, young people dress like a Stranger Things inspired mashup of 70s, 80s and 90s nowadays picking the best parts of those decades while leaving the 2000s and 2010s fashion in the dust.

Are you gonna do a certificate on microservices? And what's that gonna help when suddenly everyone starts building some shape of monoliths again because people keep running into the "no free lunch" issues?

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#50

Post by hughesjj »

Quikinterp wrote: post #46
hughesjj wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst part is we often can't share our artistic work with future employers due to IP concerns.

When so much of my resume is NDA'd it really starts to feel like "I'm a great painter, I promise, I'm just not allowed to show you any art I've made"

100%.

On the other hand, open source culture is vastly different from proprietary culture.

So many times in proprietary culture I've churned out craptastic code to meet a deadline that didn't matter for a project whose customers were straw-persons. There's definitely some projects or features I've coded which I'm glad to hide from public view.

That said, artists can curate their portfolio, and unless they're presenting to a public forum, their turds won't have to see the light of day again.

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