Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

nelson.cloud

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 625 posts

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#141

Post by Tainnor »

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…

> To the company this is acceptable noise, but to the individual, this is costing us 100s of thousands of dollars, because there’s only a handful of companies that pay well and they all have the same interview process.

If you want to earn top money, you gotta play the game. This is true in every profession, you think lawyers that want to work at top law firms have it any easier?

There's a lot of valid criticism with respect to today's tech hiring practices (especially because it doesn't only affect top paying companies), but I don't feel like "I can't get ridiculously wealthy without selling my soul" is a particularly compelling one.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#142

Post by wruza »

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…

Naive questions ahead, if hires weren’t made scarce by some absurd filter, why would they pay $200-300k extra? Feels like the whole idea of stellar salaries must be based on something stellar. Afair, before Google(?) made it normal, developers were sort of dirt cheap. Weren’t developers in abundance at all times?

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#143

Post by batshit_beaver »

concordDance wrote: post #121
logicchains wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Congratulations, you've memorized leetcode patterns. Proves nothing beyond that (except that you've also had the time recently to practice leetcode).

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#144

Post by drewcoo »

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.

You were on to something with the GP's unprovable assertion.

Then you provided your own false dichotomy and the argument went all wrong.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#145

Post by andrewstuart »

There is an absolutely vast array of stuff you need to know to write software including networking, hardware, software, database, operating system, multiple languages, mutiple tools, standards, testing, processes, and on and on and on and on. It goes on forever.

BUT one of the things I've pretty much never needed is leetcode.

That says something about recruiting processes that evaluate you on your leetcode.

If you can't come up with an interview proecss that evaluates a developer against the bajllion things that developers have to do, then it says YOU the interviewer don't know what you are doing.

I think leetcode interviews are lack of imagination on the part of the interviewer.

Being good at programming does not make you good at assessing the capabilities of other programmers.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#146

Post by surfingdino »

> "they don’t reflect the actual responsibilities of a software engineering of a job."

Exactly. I refuse to do them. Oh, your business is solving basic problems in computer science? I though you were an e-commerce platform that needed cleaning up your APIs and moving to a more efficient DB?

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#147

Post by adamors »

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.

Yes, those are the only two options. I'd rather spend time with my kids than grind for 4 hours a day to get ghosted after the 5th round of interview.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#148

Post by kristopolous »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #132
kristopolous wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I believe this is a common myth. I've spend around seven years teaching programming and people who can go from zero to decent problem solving in just six weeks are virtually non-existent. Either it wasn't a true "zero" but rather they were really good e.g. at advanced math or physics and managed to see some parallels, or it has to be a genius. I'd be very interested in hiring such a person.

Leet code is not "decent problem solving skills" but it's almost always about three types of programs: sliding window, linked list rearrangement, and BFS.

The code to solve basically all of them look nearly identical after you classify it and the questions asked (what's the big O of this) are also all identical.

It's an extremely narrow and teachable class of problems.

There's outliers for sure but the 80th percentile are basically just the same damn things slightly rephrased. It's extremely gameable and doesn't test the kind of breadth say, fixing a crashing program would show.

Here's a list of 16 https://github.com/Chanda-Abdul/Several-Coding-Patterns-for-... ... That's the 99th percentile.

If you think someone passing that means they can fix the conda bug in your k8s cluster or whatever real problem you have, dream on. It'd be like hiring a cook by quizzing them on the names of kitchen utensils.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#150

Post by batshit_beaver »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #132
kristopolous wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I believe this is a common myth. I've spend around seven years teaching programming and people who can go from zero to decent problem solving in just six weeks are virtually non-existent. Either it wasn't a true "zero" but rather they were really good e.g. at advanced math or physics and managed to see some parallels, or it has to be a genius. I'd be very interested in hiring such a person.

It's not "decent problem solving" that these folks demonstrate though, it's the ability to grasp and regurgitate common DSA patterns that show up in most leetcode style interviews. Does this ability make these people highly desirable hires? Should you hire such people over engineers with more real world knowledge, but who don't want to spend the time learning or practicing leetcode?
Post reply on HN