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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

#61

Post by zhvihti »

LC questions are a shitty way to qualify 3 traits that employers very much look for (and have proven to be correlated):

* Available time to prepare (esp. when holding a job) = available to work long hours

* Self-motivate themselves for a long time (esp. to do such bullshit work)

* Mental capacity to remember all the material (esp. given its useless outside of the interview loop)

The flip of the coin are people who can't put in the time due to e.g. family obligations, don't have the motivation, or don't have the mental capacity.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#62

Post by choppaface »

dinobones wrote: post #6

Leetcode style interviews probably serve two functions: 1) A way to suppress wages and job mobility for SWE. Who wants to switch jobs when it means studying for a month or two? Also, if you get unlucky and some try hard drops an atomic LC hard bomb on you now you have an entire company you can no longer apply to for a year. 2) A way to mask bias in the process while claiming that it’s a fair process because everyone…

Engineers typically optimize for their own learning, and the false negative rate can reflect more about how aggressively the interviewing panel wants specific peers versus how much they actually want the job done well.

Suppose there was a SWE union and the union has to create their own reference compensation bands. Would the union again lean towards leetcode or some other standardized test? Or just use years of experience and maybe past projects?

When weighing the “effectiveness” of leetcode interviews, it’s important to weigh that thus far SWEs have failed to effectively unionize despite e.g. the past class-action no-poaches clearly showing C-suites should be paying engineers a larger share.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#63

Post by poisonborz »

I think the "algo genius" type of developer is a harmful myth of the industry. In most of the SE jobs you simply need dedicated, motivated persons who love the product and are able to organically grow to what the team needs. Places idolizing leetcode are in the stressed underorganised "scale to the moon" phase, where there is a need for individuals(!) to solve whatever is thrown at them at speed.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#64

Post by kristopolous »

SilverBirch wrote: post #29

I understand the frustration, but at the end of the day I think they do serve a purpose. They're not great at that purpose, but they're good enough and they generally produce false negatives (smart people fail) rather than false positives (you hire an idiot). And this makes sense, because a false negative is low cost (maybe you spend 50% longer interviewing candidates) but a false positive is high cost (you hire an i…

There's an entire industry of bootcamps built on the premise of teaching you how to pass this exact test in like 6 weeks.

And because they ask pretty irrelevant questions, the 6 weeker will do better then the recent Stanford PhD who has been studying a specific problem for 5 years or the multimillionaire who spent the past 10 years building and selling successful software companies.

Those people will fail and your 6 weeker who's never heard of cmake, diff or gdb will pass.

When I see there's leetcode as the hiring process I presume the place is full of bozos because the process actually strongly preferences them.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#65

Post by [deleted] »

fzeroracer wrote: post #58
SilverBirch wrote: post #29

I understand the frustration, but at the end of the day I think they do serve a purpose. They're not great at that purpose, but they're good enough and they generally produce false negatives (smart people fail) rather than false positives (you hire an idiot). And this makes sense, because a false negative is low cost (maybe you spend 50% longer interviewing candidates) but a false positive is high cost (you hire an i…

How do you know they produce false negatives over false positives? How do you know if your top candidates simply didn't cheat over the honest candidates that produced worse but honest code?

[deleted]

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#66

Post by koliber »

I've interviewed developer candidates who seemed to know a lot of theory, but when it came to write some code, they failed miserably. They could not implement fizz-buzz. Senior Java developers who could not import HashMap without looking it up.

It's kind of like math. If you need to multiply 562 * 1041, you should use a calculator. If you need to reach for a calculator to tell me how much 3 * 7 is, I will doubt that you are an expert.

Many companies overdo the leetcode interviews. A live coding interview that shows that a person can do array manipulation, implement flow control, and use basic data structures shows me that you have the muscle memory that only comes with experience. If you need to study graph-traversal algorithms in order to pass, it's probably too leet.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#67

Post by kidintech »

boshalfoshal wrote: post #47
dinobones wrote: post #6

Leetcode style interviews probably serve two functions: 1) A way to suppress wages and job mobility for SWE. Who wants to switch jobs when it means studying for a month or two? Also, if you get unlucky and some try hard drops an atomic LC hard bomb on you now you have an entire company you can no longer apply to for a year. 2) A way to mask bias in the process while claiming that it’s a fair process because everyone…

The problem you are describing is interview variance and hiring bias, not leetcode. This happens irrespective of interview style. Many companies have question banks that are specially designed to be fair/have some contextual relevance (ideally) to some "realistic" problem. Or at least, many of the companies I've interviewed at follow this model. I consider these coding questions to be "leetcode" style because at the…

Question banks that are too big: huge variance, and OP's point stands.

Question banks that are too small: leaked on eastern forums immediately, candidates show up reading answers out to you (some of the guides include guidance on when to pretend to think, I am not kidding).

The idealized version of "question banks" might work. The real one does not; you'd require employees constantly scouring forums in every language known to mankind, immediately removing anything that gets leaked. On top of that you'd probably require a competent committee overseeing all questions in the bank constantly and ensuring the lack of variance in difficulty.

Source: I interviewed at and for Goog and Pltr.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#68

Post by willtemperley »

I'm happy that Amazon have a horrible leetcode style interview practice. In my interview I had to design an algorithm to detect certain combinations of fruit and veg bought from Amazon fresh, which would trigger fruit-machine style payouts. If I hadn't said "f this" and did something that actually interests me, I would probably have a huge mortgage sitting in rainy ol Blighty designing user hostile experiences like Prime cancellation. I'm poorer, happier, healthier and mentally iron-clad doing my own thing, making just enough money and travelling to where life has a reasonable cost.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#69

Post by ownagefool »

dinobones wrote: post #6

Leetcode style interviews probably serve two functions: 1) A way to suppress wages and job mobility for SWE. Who wants to switch jobs when it means studying for a month or two? Also, if you get unlucky and some try hard drops an atomic LC hard bomb on you now you have an entire company you can no longer apply to for a year. 2) A way to mask bias in the process while claiming that it’s a fair process because everyone…

I don't think the problem is the format, i.e. a 30-50 minute interview on simple coding with DS&A problems, but the escalation.

The reality is, fizz buzz got us 75% of the way there. It turns out when pressed, a lot of people can't write code. Yes, there's false positives, but there's also people brute focing their way through via copy & paste.

This doesn't manifest as a person who can't do any task, just as a person that's slow, delivers weird abstractions, and would take a lot of your time to get anything useful from.

But those people are also making those arguments, because, as you said, there's hundreds of thousands of dollars in it.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#70

Post by danparsonson »

maccard wrote: post #32
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.

Right - the number one skill demonstrated by Leetcode-style interviews is the willingness to grind Leetcode.
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