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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

#111

Post by gigatexal »

I don’t think anyone is saying in a traditional SWE role data structures and algorithms aren’t useful things to have some me amount of mastery about (higher levels required for higher levels of seniority maybe)… but it’s just hilarious and also sad that we’ve, as an industry, not been able to move away from these logic puzzles disguised as programming tasks that ostensibly should mimic a typical task but serve only to filter out groups of people.

Of course I don’t know the replacement I just know I loathe doing these things and would rather learn more about what the day to day would be like, what’s the team like, the manager, the growth potential, etc. I am all proving my skills but can I do so in an environment that is more congruent with my actual work?

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#112

Post by sethammons »

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…

There is no grand conspiracy. People try to develop what they feel is a fair interview with good signals. It simply turns out that many people are not good at that and have biases that they may not even be aware of. Tackle on some cargo culting and "best practices" and you have your typical broken process.

For those wondering what the alternative is to leetcode: a work sample test. Take a real problem your team solved recently, distill it down to remove internal-specific knowledge, and give candidates 3x the time to solve it compared to what it takes an internal dev to solve. Bonus points for having a rubric guide the scoring.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#113

Post by moomin »

I am good at leetcode interviews. So are a lot of people reading this. For the most part, this is for the same reason: at some point we sat down and practiced until we were good at them. It’s a useful skill to have and I recommend to people on job searches that they learn it.

Would I recommend it if there weren’t so many leetcode interviews out there? No, I wouldn’t. It’s not a useful skill for actual programming; it won’t make you smarter. It will, however, establish that you have a lifestyle that affords you the kind of free time to devote to it.

So yeah, I’ll happily jump through these hoops. Honestly, I’m the personality type that finds it fun. But it’s a lousy way to assess my abilities as a dev.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#114

Post by alexey-salmin »

radicalbyte wrote: post #57
alexey-salmin wrote: post #39

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 qui…

I like giving SWEs small coding problems but it's more of a filter against: a) The 90% of applicants who literally cannot code. Although I filter out 99.9% of those by screening CVs and a short telephone interview. b) They can be a point for more discussion. It's silly to give someone, in an interview setting, an exam question style problem and to make that a key factor in the interview. It's up there with giving som…

> I've tried everything and I've had the best results by talking, digging into the details.

That's always the second interview I do: "tell me about your favorite project", then asking questions about details, possible alternatives and pros/cons, fundamental limitations, anticipated issues, real production issues, etc etc, going as deep as possible. This works really well and filters out people who do leetcode but don't pay attention to details in their work or have no real experience (if you're looking for one).

However, the couple of times I hired people who nailed this part but failed the coding, they also failed at coding at work. So both interviews are necessary in my opinion.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#116

Post by dsotirovski »

resource_waste wrote: post #101
pkos98 wrote: post #91

Since 99% of people have to study hard to pass LC (medium/hard), it effectively acts as a selector for employee conformity. People who play by the rules imposed upon them, who work long hours if corp wants them to etc. All the talk about diversity, but no diversity of thought. Only LC chasers. I genuinely believe this decreases innovation massively.

>All the talk about diversity, but no diversity of thought. Only LC chasers. I genuinely believe this decreases innovation massively. Nice belief, but good luck proving it. I imagine the people grinding LC are harder working/more innovative than people who watched TV instead.

>I imagine the people grinding LC are harder working/more innovative than people who watched TV instead.

I suspect the original author of the article that spawned this comment thread prepared for the interview somewhat rather than watching TV instead - and still got sickened of the LT style interview.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#117

Post by aqme28 »

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 buy the analysis on 1). Leetcode interviews restrict the pool of SWEs. You have a lot of SWEs who fail to qualify any more, but the few that do are more coveted and get to command higher wages

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#118

Post by drewcoo »

throwaway346434 wrote: post #96
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…

Send the candidate off with a broken unit test to fix, own tools, comfortable environment like home, 1 hour time box. I like to do something horrible based on timezones, or phone number validation, with a Wikipedia article that is the spec. At the end, ask the candidate about their solution, and do a code review session. The (best) seniors just use a library. The good candidates roll their own, but can explain the tr…

> something horrible based on timezones, or phone number validation

What? Do you have something against zip codes and email addresses?

I like to ask something to do with strings - English sentences. I tell them it's intractable in the time we have and that I really want to see how they whitebox-test the code they write, so take ~10m timebox to write the code, then write some tests - at least one test that finds a bug.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#119

Post by ojhughes »

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…

> I would probably have a huge mortgage sitting in rainy ol Blighty

Feeling a bit triggered by this - but also curious how you escaped :)

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#120

Post by underdeserver »

What exactly about Leetcode interviews can you Google, except the actual solution to the actual question (which you can probably Google for non-leetcode interview questions too)?

I always thought that while Leetcode interviews are problematic because they don't represent most of the work you're going to do, they're much better than interviews where you're expected to namedrop specific API functions or design patterns.

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