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

201–210 of 625 posts

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#201

Post by kristopolous »

gigatexal wrote: post #171
sethammons wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That kind of out of the box thinking is where I think the industry should go. But would it scale to the Google's of the world? Probably not. They'll continue filtering people through the sieve that is the leet-code style interview.

Sure it would. The problem described above can be manufactured.

Every team of every job you enter does things in their own snowflakey way. If that's new or foreign to you, good luck.

You can permute some base instance in many ways. Filter out the comments in the code or change the variables and function names to be terse and cryptic.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#202

Post by eschneider »

yobbo wrote: post #137
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…

What about a type of blind interview where neither of the two know the problem or solution in advance. After, their solution is blindly reviewed/graded by a third party. - Input from the interviewer reflects communication ability, cultural fit, and so on of the candidate. - Input from the blind grader reflects ability of them as a team. - Low grades count against the interviewer as well. Bingo; now both are stakehold…

This is very much like the "real world" situation. OTOH, I think this leaves the interviewee even more vulnerable to the unfortunate situation where they correctly solve the problem but the interviewer is convinced that a different, wrong solution is correct. Live long enough and you'll have that happen to you.

OTOH, seeing how the interviewer reacts to that situation will tell you a lot about whether you really want to work there.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#204

Post by vundercind »

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 proof of some of this is that these companies could come up with a standardized test maybe with, say, smaller-scale refreshers every few years (this is normal in some professional certs) and save a ton of money if it were really about ensuring a base level of competence using these sorts of questions as the yardstick.

But that would dramatically increase worker mobility, for one thing. So they don’t do that.

(“No it’s because they don’t want you to be able to test prep” that makes no sense because 99% of the way to prep for these is… exactly like test prep)

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#206

Post by kristopolous »

underdeserver wrote: post #120

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…

https://github.com/Chanda-Abdul/Several-Coding-Patterns-for-...

Memorize that and you'll pass them all and won't be able to deal with 1,000,000 SLOC code bases in the slightest

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#207

Post by kristopolous »

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.

They're certainly proxies for other things.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#208

Post by alentred »

rckt wrote: post #184

A good interview is an absolutely rare thing. I can't name the chances, but throughout one's career it's going to be close to amount of jobs one's going to land. More likely less than that number. From my experience you can say it's going to be good or bad right from the start. 5 minutes into an interview and you can already see where's it's going to end. I don't understand when companies try to give test assignments…

Agreed on first two points. You often can get a feel of a company based on the interview.

> I don't understand when companies try to give test assignments to senior developers.

I think this is perfectly valid, though. When I interview candidates, I start with the conversation and I can tell you that more often than not it goes very well: talking about software design, architecture, what they think about various frameworks, etc.

But you would be surprised how many people can talk their way through the interview, and then get totally blocked on a simple syntax error in the code. (Stress being accounted for).

I agree, though, that the questions should be fairly designed before the interview and be consistent with the level of the expertise expected for the position. I would never ask a senior developer to implement a FizzBuzz. We'd rather sketch an architecture for some piece of software with some specific constraints, discuss the choices of the language and libraries and argument them, etc. And yes, eventually code something: just sketch some core domain logic. I would never hire a software developer, whatever the level, without seeing them coding first.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#209

Post by silvestrov »

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…

I think Google suffers from a side effect: only the academic side was valued so maintaining existing systems is considered career suicide.

Most programming work needs common sense a lot more than it needs theoretical algorithmic knowledge.

And almost nobody values good documentation, especially as a competetive advantage.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#210

Post by kidintech »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #195
kidintech wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> leaked on eastern forums immediately What exactly are "Eastern forums"? "Eastern" what? Europe? Asia? The world?

The most common example would be 1point3acres.

I'd prefer to not be more specific; I chose the word Eastern on purpose.

For DEI committees reading this: I am both eastern european and asian, so I hope to be exempt from any scrutiny.

Post reply on HN