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I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

nelson.cloud

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Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#31

Post by dudul »

dvt wrote: post #16

> I don’t really have a solution to this problem, I just know it’s a problem. The solution is simple: refuse to do those interviews. I have, and I wish more engineers would. It's one of my screening questions: do you do whiteboard style quiz/brainteaser interviews? If the answer is affirmative, I politely (and sometimes impolitely) decline. I've written a book, edited another, contributed to plenty of open source, in…

And next week we'll read on HN an article explaining how take homes are unfair, racist and biased, same for "private projects".

We've been going in circles for 20 years.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#32

Post by maccard »

osy wrote: post #27

It's true that nobody is expected to balance a binary tree as part of the job but the point of these questions is to see how you approach the problem and how you communicate your solution. Given that you can't perfectly predict how someone will do at the job, employers use leetcode problems as a proxy. Even those who memorize leetcode solutions must also memorize how it works and understand the solution. Given that t…

> the point of these questions is to see how you approach the problem and how you communicate your solution

I disagree. It’s supposed to be that, but the reality of the interview is that there isn’t any time to problem solve so you need to learn the problems and just regurgitate the solution.

That doesn’t put you in the top 0.1%, it ensures you’ve spent dozens of hours practicing questions.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#33

Post by mjfisher »

fvdessen wrote: post #9

The unfortunate reality is that If you don't do this you'll hire people who can't program

There's a difference between asking someone to invert a binary tree, and asking someone to sum up a list of numbers. The latter finds the people who can't code much more quickly!

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#34

Post by swuecho »

The market is so bad, and most interview sucks one way or another. The main reason is interviewer have tens or hundreds application for same position.

I have just went through one interview that have 4 rounds.

1. half hour talk 2. 2 hours coding for several crud api. 3. system design project ( I spend 2 days on it. they told I have about a week on it) 4. another half hours with CTO.

and then got rejected. (The interviewers does not bother to send a reject letter. I asked them they told me the position is closed).

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#35

Post by poisonborz »

boshalfoshal wrote: post #17

I see these posts a lot, and I sort of disagree with where they are coming from so I'll play devils advocate. Leetcode is used to select for one of (or both of these) 2 things for the average IC hire: 1. Do you work hard (i.e a person who studies many problems, memorizes solutions, and regurgitates then) 2. Are you smart (i.e a person who doesn't do any leetcode but knows the fundamentals and can sythesize past knowl…

2. Are you smart (i.e a person who doesn't do any leetcode but knows the fundamentals and can sythesize past knowledge well enough to answer a new question)

Leetcode questions can by definition never come close to real life problems - they are simply out of context. Working on a project even a few weeks will grant a smart person any insights he might actually need. The kind of out of the blue puzzle problem a leetcode presents is more akin to crosswords in old leisure magazines.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#36

Post by FL33TW00D »

Another interesting point about Leetcode-style interviews I've not seen raised: it's a form of intellectual hazing.

It's been proven many times that the severity of an initiation ceremony significantly boosts the commitment of those admitted to the group.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#37

Post by innocentoldguy »

I hear you!

I quit doing engineering work for companies, but back when I did, I'd take some complex code I'd written to interviews. I tell the interviewers that I'm happy to step through my code and explain it during the interview, but that I wasn't interested in wasting hours of my weekend writing a werpderzle or answering gotcha questions.

Some companies agreed and I ended up working for them and some companies didn't, so I'd end the interview. In my experience, companies that over-complicate the interview process also over-complicate their day-to-day work, and I don't have any interest in working in that sort of environment.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#38

Post by apples_oranges »

A friend once in the middle of a technical interview stopped speaking, stood up and went out. They ran after him, "what's wrong, you're doing fine!" and he told them it depresses him too much and he's not interested anymore. Sad, given that this is a fun profession for most of us (I assume)

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#39

Post by alexey-salmin »

Hot take: I like leetcode-style interviews and I've spent a lot of time in them on both sides of the fence (tens of hours as a candidate, hundreds as an interviewer).

> But yet, these interviews quiz me on things that I can easily Google that I may not know off the top of my head. It’s absurd.

I don't work at Google so I'm lucky to have freedom in the way I interview engineers and usually I try to squeeze out the quiz aspect as much as possible.

If a candidate doesn't know the algorithm for a given problem and can't quickly come up with one, I usually proceed to give a detailed explanation for it. In the end the task is reduced to "write between 6 and 10 lines of code that do X in your favorite language" and yet a majority (80-90%) of inbound candidates for software engineering fail at it (for non-inbound sources a picture can be very different of course).

Contrary to a common view, I believe that this approach actually imitates my daily interactions with a developer quite well and the correlation between interview performance and job performance is very strong in my experience.

And interestingly I've seen many people who shine in oral interviews (tell me about your experience) and then fail to produce any code at all, both during the interview and at work. So even if I wanted a good alternative approach to hiring of engineers I haven't seen it so far.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#40

Post by CSDude »

I agree it's not a great way but a good compromise. When you think of Leetcode you can be thinking of hard questions. But this is not the case for many of us.

Not all of us get a chance to work with a great candidate pool. So, whenever someone fails to provide a solution given an integer list, find the pairs that sum is equal to N, I don't care how many technologies they have worked with or how well they can talk about it, I don't feel comfortable working with them.

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