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Interviews in the Age of AI: Ditch Leetcode – Try Code Reviews Instead

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Re: Interviews in the Age of AI: Ditch Leetcode – Try Code Reviews Instead

#31

Post by danwee »

Not sure if it would be any better, and I say this as someone who hates leetcode-related interviews.

Code reviews are way more subjective than writing a piece code (at the end of the interview session, if the code works, then that's a huge thing already).

If I highlight something like "Perhaps we could inject that dependency, instead of harcoding it": sure, that seems probably the most correct assesment, but again, what if we are dealing with a really small project and hardcoding the dependency is the best way? Same goes for variable names ("i" is too short? Depends on the scope, right? Well, probably it depends on the interviewer's mind), what about composition vs inheritance? Again, subjective as hell. And don't let me get started with anything related to microservices vs monolith...

Re: Interviews in the Age of AI: Ditch Leetcode – Try Code Reviews Instead

#32

Post by shortrounddev2 »

Aurornis wrote: post #29
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not him but 1.) DS and Algo knowledge are way overrated in day-to-day job functions. I have yet to have to implement a single DS or Algo from those classes (they are almost always available to the framework, standard library, or language), runtime complexity has literally never once come up in my life, and the most I've ever needed to know about data structures is "which one should I use here?" and 99% of the time it…

> runtime complexity has literally never once come up in my life There are definitely different types of programming jobs, but for some contrast: I have never had a job where runtime complexity did not come up as a significant factor somewhat frequently. It really comes down to what you’re doing, but at a certain scale or size of problem you really do need to know about algorithms, data structures, and runtime comple…

In my experience the biggest bottlenecks are in the network. Most optimizations are also very very low hanging fruit because the original code was written by a moron

Re: Interviews in the Age of AI: Ditch Leetcode – Try Code Reviews Instead

#33

Post by wiremine »

I'm a CTO for a small software studio. We've used mini projects and code reviews in our interview process for years, and it works great. The code review is a great way to explore a candidate's ability to code, and also to communicate their decisions about a piece of code.

In the "age of AI", I'm not sure we'll ditch the mini projects. I think testing a candidate's ability to _use_ AI to generate code is an important skill. However, it's so new, I'm not sure what the best practices might be.

I'd be curious if anyone has any advice on this front...

Re: Interviews in the Age of AI: Ditch Leetcode – Try Code Reviews Instead

#34

Post by ClumsyPilot »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #11
hotnfresh wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially when they don’t pay FAANG money. If I were capable of looking good during the only experience in my adult life that feels like having a solo in a middle school strings recital, I’d be applying to those places, not yours.

I don't know if this is what you meant, but to me this reads as: "I don't know anything about data structures or algorithms".

This reads to me as '90% of interviewers are incompetent at interviewing'. Most developers have no training in how to interview properly and little interest in learning, to most of them its a distraction and a bother.

Most developers tend to ask questions about stuff they found challening or interesting, without consideration for how this related to the day to day job.

Like asking a web developer to perform binary shift operations, idenity magic bytes, work with complex numbers, non-trivial question about geometry from people who have no reason to use geometry in this or previous jobs.

I had two interview stages at AWS, second interviwer asked the exact same questions as the first one, and became angry when I pointed out that they probably had a mix up.

Also you sometimes get poor communication from interviewer, unclear instructions, and interviewers literally making mistakes in recursion but telling the candidate they got it wrong.

Re: Interviews in the Age of AI: Ditch Leetcode – Try Code Reviews Instead

#36

Post by codeTired »

bluehorizon2 wrote: post #26

People are forgetting why companies these days do Leetcode in the first place. The initial reason why we have Leetcode today is that Google originally determined through their interview research that the smartest candidates were the ones who were best at algorithms. Google wanted to hire the smartest people, not necessarily the best coders, so that’s why their interviews were mostly algorithmic. Of course everyone st…

The problem is that it might have been true at some point but now there are resources to “learn” for interviews, so currently you will get people willing to grind.

Nobody happy with their pay and job is going to grind leetcode.

They could just ignore leetcode and ask puzzle problems instead to test ability.

Re: Interviews in the Age of AI: Ditch Leetcode – Try Code Reviews Instead

#37

Post by hcks »

baka367 wrote: post #19
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you will have people watching you work and you will be under time pressure in normal work as well, so if you just turn to spagetti at interview are you actually going to perform any better at day to day?

When was the last time you had to nail out a fully working nlog(n) longest valid bracket sequence in to prod within 45 mins, without spending 3 weeks in meetings, design doc reviews, capacity plannings and allocations and alignments with the said bracket owners?

meetings, design doc reviews, capacity plannings and allocations and alignments are not supposed to be used as ways to hide mediocrity

Re: Interviews in the Age of AI: Ditch Leetcode – Try Code Reviews Instead

#38

Post by trescenzi »

christofosho wrote: post #7

For take home reviews, I wonder what the impact of generative AI would be. I can see a lot of people feeding the code segment into an AI and using it's comments instead of generating their own. Of course, people will do that with programming questions as well, so I suppose it's up to the hiring manager to decide on the best method to handle this situation. What strategies do people leverage to avoid purely AI answers…

With a take home, and honestly any kind of interview, the key is not in the deliverable it's in the discussion about it. To be totally honest as a hiring manager I don't care if a take home was fully written by AI so long as when we discuss the solution the candidate can clearly explain how the code works and why it was written that way. Of course in the case of an AI the why might be flimsy but if it isn't then who cares. The goal is to hire someone who's capable of solving problems and in turn explaining their solutions I don't care who wrote the code.

Re: Interviews in the Age of AI: Ditch Leetcode – Try Code Reviews Instead

#39

Post by codeTired »

wiremine wrote: post #33

I'm a CTO for a small software studio. We've used mini projects and code reviews in our interview process for years, and it works great. The code review is a great way to explore a candidate's ability to code, and also to communicate their decisions about a piece of code. In the "age of AI", I'm not sure we'll ditch the mini projects. I think testing a candidate's ability to _use_ AI to generate code is an important…

I use AI to generate code sometimes but it often doesn’t work as expected. Other times I get just awfully inefficient answer. Someone who has programmed without AI for a few years will spot those things. Someone who doesn’t have any “gut feeling” formed about code and just relies strictly on AI will do awful.

I think your approach is good, I would introduce things that work but are terrible design decisions and have the person interviewing figure out what could be improved.

Re: Interviews in the Age of AI: Ditch Leetcode – Try Code Reviews Instead

#40

Post by Dudester230602 »

wiremine wrote: post #33

I'm a CTO for a small software studio. We've used mini projects and code reviews in our interview process for years, and it works great. The code review is a great way to explore a candidate's ability to code, and also to communicate their decisions about a piece of code. In the "age of AI", I'm not sure we'll ditch the mini projects. I think testing a candidate's ability to _use_ AI to generate code is an important…

Would you allow employees to subcontract and outsource their work?
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