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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

#81

Post by boshalfoshal »

kidintech wrote: post #67
boshalfoshal wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with you, but I don't really see how this invalidates the style of interviews where you're presented with some timeboxed coding problem (of reasonably scaled difficulty) and are asked to solve it.

There will be bad actors regardless of the interview style, thats why companies have multiple interview types/styles/rounds to sus out a candidate, as you probably know.

If they BSed their way through a leetcode interview, then they probably won't make it past a behavioral interview where they have to go in depth on some past project. And if they BSed that as well as every other round, then hey maybe they are crafty enough to succeed at the actual job.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#82

Post by was_in_amazon »

willtemperley wrote: post #68

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 P…

Ex Amazon here. I never heard of leetcode style interviews at Amazon.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#83

Post by kidintech »

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…

I am genuinely curious:

I am starting a company, and I need smart people; I do not care how good they are at programming language X, or technology T - all the skills my employees will need can be learned on the job.

I want to optimize the time it takes for an arbitrary hire to become independent, to have learned the basics, and to make meaningful contributions. They would write code at most 20% of the time, and the job has many other nuances.

In your opinion, what would a process that you wouldn't refuse look like? Would a learning interview (I present something that you have not seen before, act as an oracle, provide docs, evaluate how quickly you pick up concepts) be so insulting?

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#84

Post by logicchains »

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…

Hard leetcode questions hire grinders, not thinkers. Many of those questions were thesis/publication-worthy decades ago when first solved; it's unlikely for even a very intelligent person to produce a similar result in just tens of minutes. So if someone solves it, it's much more likely to be because they saw it or a similar question while grinding practice questions than that they genuinely derived the optimal solution from scratch.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#86

Post by iLoveOncall »

I see LeetCode as a pure numbers game. Keep applying until you get easy questions and don't get hung up on your failures.

I work at a FAANG but if I had another interviewer I probably wouldn't.

For me it's the same process as the green card lottery: apply to your target company every year / six months (cooldown period) until you eventually get it.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#88

Post by resource_waste »

watwut wrote: post #77
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. Th…

>They are not software engineers and it shows massively.

Coming from Real Engineering and making 2x more programming, I lol at people who say there is any Engineering in software.

We are programmers dealing with layers upon layers of abstraction. Knowing to optimize for time by using vectors is more of an art, than a science.

I did do safety critical C code and Assembly which are probably my hole in the whole 'its not engineering'. But javascript/python/backend work: programming.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#89

Post by dinobones »

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…

I take issue with it because Leetcode gives tech people a fake feel good, “yeah but at least it’s fair” illusion, when really it’s probably just as biased as any other hiring method.

This is ironic considering these companies have forced mandatory DEI seminars (which I have no problem with btw), inclusive language, #EveryoneCanCode, and so on.

But despite all this, you end up with teams and organizations that are 99% of the same X somehow. Replace X with race, school, even state from home country sometimes.

You know there are websites where people share all the interview questions to these hard interviews / referrals exclusively in their language and behind a pay or rep wall? And there are Telegram groups where international students leaks the questions or do interviews in place for one another.

It’s inevitable these types of issues arise when there’s so much at stake, ex: in just 5 years, a $200k TC advantage at a top company, becomes $1m or more with appreciation.

I just really dislike the veneer of “fairness” when there are so many problems with the process, even beyond the questions that have nothing to do with the job.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#90

Post by kristopolous »

codegladiator wrote: post #59
Kichererbsen wrote: post #19

The last few interviews I've run, I've shown the candidate sample code and asked them to review it. We have samples that have at least one bug / problem per line. Then some modeling task (whiteboard). We have some simple exercises (fizzbuzz style) to figure out if juniors actually can junior and as a springboard into discussing topics like runtime complexity, memory layout and stuff. This is all highly interactive, d…

I use this https://github.com/emilybache/GildedRose-Refactoring-Kata in their favorite language. Has been a very effective filter

I'd give a bit of guidance. This can go so many ways. I can see many right but totally different answers.

In any interview, I kind of presume that the interviewer has a "perfect answer" in mind and is playing some game where I basically need to guess what number they're thinking of.

I'd make it clear that anything is ok. Just go some direction

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