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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

#121

Post by concordDance »

logicchains wrote: post #84
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 solut…

I disagree with this. I can solve the majority of leetcode hard problems in under an hour despite not having seen them before and I'm far from the smartest person I've met.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#122

Post by physicsguy »

My biggest concern about Leetcode is that it’s not actually that relevent to the day to day job of being a software engineer and has more to do with being a computer scientist which is an adjacent but different set of skills.

I’ve worked mainly on scientific software which requires a mix of domain knowledge and programming skills. I doubt many people who I’ve worked with would pass leetcode without spending a lot of time studying, because they primarily come from Physics/Engineering backgrounds, but that doesn’t mean that they are not good software engineers, that the software they’re writing is not performant, or that they can’t offer anything valuable.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#123

Post by varjag »

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)

I'm sorry but it's incredible hubris to think you'll come up with say Dijkstra's algorithm during the interview from the first principles. The only reason you can do it is you studied it before.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#124

Post by sjaak »

ownagefool wrote: post #69
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…

I've also used FizzBuzz at several companies, and the insane amount of people it filters out continues to boggle my mind.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#126

Post by drewcoo »

CSMastermind wrote: post #51

The important thing to screen a software engineer for is not knowledge but the strength of their problem solving and ability to build mental models of problems. Whiteboard interviews are a good way to evaluate these skills - assuming the candidate hasn't seen this particular problem before and the interviewer understands that this is what they're supposed to look for. Goodhart's law applies - the measure becomes a ta…

> Then over time these grinders get high enough up they start becoming interviewers themselves and they don't understand that they're even supposed to screen for talent, they conduct the interview like a memory test since to them that's what it was.

They say As hire Bs and Bs hire Cs . . . and to combat that we've added more leetcode to the interview process.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#127

Post by lupusreal »

dinobones wrote: post #89
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…

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%…

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

I really do wonder what those sanctimonious sermons are meant to accomplish. People who are already ideologically aligned with them won't learn anything new and may just resent it, while people who aren't aligned won't become aligned as a result of that "training".

But you're talking about it as though you expect it to have a constructive impact, resulting in irony when it doesn't. I don't see the irony because I don't expect any benefit from those struggle sessions in the first place.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#128

Post by sethammons »

gigatexal wrote: post #111

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 t…

See: work sample test.

My best received interview question was for a bug/firefighting team. Based on a real bug we had, here is a sanitized repo (perl or python, our languages at the time) with some sql and data. We gave them three made up support tickets about some settings values being incorrect causing $issue. Dig into the utility script, find bugs, fix the data.

Even folks who didn't pass complemented the task

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#129

Post by jonkho »

369548684892826 wrote: post #56
emodendroket wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure anyone determined to do so can act unfairly regardless of what process is in place, but the fact that there is a standardized test in my mind does the opposite and makes the process much fairer. Assuming a fair-minded interviewer, the process gives a chance to a candidate whose resume may have less vaunted names on it to demonstrate their skill. I'm quite sure that I'd never have had some of the opportunitie…

> the fact that there is a standardized test in my mind does the opposite and makes the process much fairer The problem isn't standardized tests, it's that leetcode questions are about having the time to have learnt the answer beforehand, rather than raw ability for problem solving.

That’s not true. In any discipline when confronted with a test there are two strategies: brute memorization of the question/answers, or developing the skills to tackle the problem dynamically. You cannot categorically claim that LC tests are largely memorization tests rather than raw problem-solving skills. That is just the approach you are capable of taking. Not being able to see up the mountain doesn’t imply there are no climbers above you.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#130

Post by gjadi »

watwut wrote: post #80
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?

And now any editors with LSP integration do the same.
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