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Leetcode Considered Harmful

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Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#51

Post by cardanome »

The advantage of leetcode style interviews is that they appear to be objective. Anyone can learn to be good at them if they have the time and base intelligence to prepare for them.

Of course they are not really that fair for people that don't have the time to learn the circus tricks because they have family and stuff but at least there is some appearance of fairness.

Also, compared to other performance based testing, the time requirements on both sides are kind of reasonable. I get more annoyed when the interview process requires me to basically provide free work.

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#52

Post by eikenberry »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #48
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…

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

Curious if you'd consider this Wikipedia article on the topic to be a decent representation?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartered_Engineer_(UK)

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#53

Post by kamil3141 »

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 1, you don’t really have to consolidate them just to check if the whole range is covered. You can just sort beginnings and ends together and then iterate over them with some tmp variable to check that you always have at least one beginning “open” (n log n).

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#54

Post by philwelch »

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…

If programming is an art, then the programmer should have an audition instead of an interview. Which is approximately what leetcode is.

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#55

Post by scarmig »

Leetcode is simple: performance on it is a proxy for a combination of two metrics, raw IQ and willingness to consistently jump through a series of arbitrary hoops to achieve some end, which is a predictor of success at large companies.

If you're hiring at scale, there's nothing else that matches it in terms of difficulty to game and cheapness of cost to implement. And for every engineer who says that they refuse out of principle to do Leetcode, there are ten who refuse to do time consuming take home projects and the nth implementation of a bespoke open source static site generator just to build a portfolio on Github.

Most smaller companies can and must figure out other hiring niches for overlooked/available candidates since they can't effectively compete with large companies for good conventional candidates using the same hiring process (e.g. by offering candidates more flexibility, taking more hiring risks), but pretending it's not a tradeoff isn't taking the problem seriously.

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#56

Post by matthewmacleod »

samsquire wrote: post #39
pengaru wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Every one of those companies (except possibly Apple) absolutely is a contributor to the Linux kernel.

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#57

Post by MaxBarraclough »

eikenberry wrote: post #52
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Curious if you'd consider this Wikipedia article on the topic to be a decent representation? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartered_Engineer_(UK)

That's the stuff I was thinking of, yes.

As a software person I don't know enough about the scheme to comment on the quality of the article, but knowing Wikipedia I imagine it's on point.

edit For a broader context than just the UK, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_licensure_in_en...

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#58

Post by mjburgess »

scarmig wrote: post #55

Leetcode is simple: performance on it is a proxy for a combination of two metrics, raw IQ and willingness to consistently jump through a series of arbitrary hoops to achieve some end, which is a predictor of success at large companies. If you're hiring at scale, there's nothing else that matches it in terms of difficulty to game and cheapness of cost to implement. And for every engineer who says that they refuse out…

The problem is that we have no theory of intelligence that tells us what, if anything, IQ is actually measuring.

If you renamed IQ to "linear-correlated ability to take non-domain specific tests", or "GTTQ" (general test-taking quotient). Then you'd explain every observed correlation between IQ and non-IQ performance.

So, do businesses want intelligent software engineers, or those with a high GTTQ score? As research at google, iirc, has shown: high performers on coding challenges tend to do worse in practice.

Any plausible theory of "competent software engineering" would, I think, place an extremely minor emphasis on a GTTQ. Intelligence is a much richer phenomenon (need for cognition, curiosity, resilliance to failure, domain-specific depth-wise thinking, cross-domain lateral, etc.)....

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#59

Post by eikenberry »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #57
eikenberry wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious if you'd consider this Wikipedia article on the topic to be a decent representation? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartered_Engineer_(UK)

That's the stuff I was thinking of, yes. As a software person I don't know enough about the scheme to comment on the quality of the article, but knowing Wikipedia I imagine it's on point. edit For a broader context than just the UK, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_licensure_in_en...

Thanks!

Re: Leetcode Considered Harmful

#60

Post by AstralStorm »

philwelch wrote: post #54
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…

If programming is an art, then the programmer should have an audition instead of an interview. Which is approximately what leetcode is.

Except that would be like asking say a piano performer to run Liszt etudes mechanically, when you're hiring someone to play at your wedding. Completely different skills. Sometimes, you do need someone with these skills. These times are few. Often, a person forced to train to this test will neglect other skills or be unable to match top tier performance in the weird test.

Wrong audition can be worse than no audition.

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