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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

#71

Post by boffinAudio »

apples_oranges wrote: post #38

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)

I've done the same thing, at a games company well-known for its perks and benefits, but also its crazy production schedules .. I thought I wanted to work there, and up until about half-way through the interview, I did, but then out came the whiteboard and in came the peers to see me implement basic things in pen, and actually it felt like a ritualized mobbing, because as I progressed through their challenges, things got more and more antagonistic and downright rude, and I realized they were testing me to see if I could deal with vitriol and hostility while producing technically minor results .. I simply stopped the interview, stood up, and said "I've made my decision, I don't really want to work with you guys now that I've seen how things are done, thanks for the opportunity and sorry to waste our time" .. and walked out.

The CEO chased me out into the parking lot and begged me to tell him what I saw and why the interview went awry. He was legitimately shocked that an interviewee could make such a decision, mid-interview .. All I could tell him was that it wasn't going to be a great fit, the culture didn't seem aligned, and the people who were brought in to the interview seemed desperate and hostile to each other - and that simply wasn't the way I had hoped that the company operated.

People forget that job interviews are a two-way street.

I realized that day that I have every right to inspect all aspects of a company that I might work for, and that I don't really have to make compromises if I see something negative during the process. It was the right decision because the very next day, at another competing firm, I met folks who have continued to be good, close friends and colleagues, whom I actually really enjoy being around.

This profession is fun. But when the fun gets farmed and exploited, its enslavement like any other.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#72

Post by praptak »

Joel Spolsky, whose influential articles started the Leetcode-style interviewing, agrees we need something better:

"But today Spolsky has mixed feelings about his guide — and its impacts on hiring in tech. “So this idea that you’re going to have a rigorous interview where you bring people in on the whiteboard and you say, ‘Show me how to copy a string while deleting the letter Q. In C, on the whiteboard.’ That was a big step up, I think, from, you know, ‘What college did you go to and who do you know and where did you work?’” [...]

“It’s a great way to hire 10 developers. It’s a very bad way to get developers in a scarce environment where you’re trying to find the people that might be good.”

A lot of good programmers end up getting rejected — while, even worse, companies end up hiring people who are good at passing tests, but underperform in the real world. “I think that method is definitely state-of-the-art 1995. It was even good for 2005. For 2018, I think you need a better system, and I think it’s probably going to be more like an apprenticeship or an internship, where you bring people on with a much easier filter at the beginning. And you hire them kind of on an experimental basis or on a training basis, and then you have to sort of see what they can do in the first month or two.”

Article: https://thenewstack.io/joel-spolsky-on-stack-overflow-inclus...

HN discussion thereof: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39748546

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#74

Post by easyThrowaway »

fvdessen wrote: post #9

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

...Instead you end up hiring people who can memorize every test from leetcode.com without having the slightest idea on how or when to use those data structures and algorithms in the real world.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#75

Post by gamebak »

I share the exact feeling as you do, it's a lot of bs that has almost no value. None of those problems reflect what business needs to solve; everything today can be Googled and fixed with straightforward code.

Usually, the computing part isn't the part that prevents a business from scaling more (servers are cheap).

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#77

Post by watwut »

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…

They do produce plenty of false positives - just not "you hire an idiot" kind. You will hire a person completely unsuitable for the actual job, but is good at leet. Issue is not the lack of intelligence. Issue is not being software engineer despite being good at algorithms. Or not being good at whatever your position requires.

I do work in a team where majority was hired by puzzles of sorts. All of them are smart. They are not software engineers and it shows massively.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#78

Post by forrestthewoods »

> Especially since I know for a fact they don’t reflect the actual responsibilities of a software engineering of a job.

This is irrelevant. No interview can accurately reflect actual job behaviors.

Job interviews are a proxy. Either they produce false positives/negatives or they don’t. It doesn’t matter that the proxy isn’t 1:1 with day-to-day.

I sympathize with job seekers dealing with leet code interviews. But I’m somewhat over the million blog posts that say the same thing. I’d be much more interested in hearing from the other side. Hiring is a nigh impossible task. People rarely share reproducible alternatives. Only hand wavey gut checks. It’s unfortunate this is the best we’ve come up with. Hiring is hard!

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#79

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#80

Post by watwut »

koliber wrote: post #66

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…

> Senior Java developers who could not import HashMap without looking it up.

Eclipse does not without me having to even look at it. IntelliJ does the same. In what situation these people had to import it by hand? They had no ide available or what?

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