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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

#251

Post by raincole »

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…

To you, someone who doesn't know which namespace HashMap belongs to is like someone who can't do 3 * 7...?

Not sure it's a satire about interviewer stereotype or...

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#252

Post by kidintech »

dfadsadsf wrote: post #233
kidintech wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 j…

> all the skills my employees will need can be learned on the job. > optimize the time it takes for an arbitrary hire to become independent So you are looking for somebody in top 5% cognitive ability and top 5% independence which is what pretty much every other employer wants. My advice is if you can pay competitive FAANG salaries (or compensate lower salaries by prestige/saving humanity/bringing people to Mars), jus…

realistically we're looking for much higher (sub 1%) cognitive ability. I understand this is highly sought after, so we incentivize by paying a few times what FAANG does locally.

I was genuinely wondering how OP preferred to be approached vis-a-vis this sort of assessment, since they suggested that they would walk out on conventional approaches. I mentioned cognitive ability and ability to learn as I feel those are harder to extrapolate from one's existing publications/contributions/take-home assessments, compared to in-person discussion(s).

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#253

Post by bossyTeacher »

emodendroket wrote: post #22
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'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…

> 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.

This is what privilege looks like. The inability to see barriers that affect others in a worse position.

Standards do not imply fairness only consistency.

You got a test that filters out people who lack the time to train for these tests. Basically, devs with a life (see family)

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#254

Post by kidintech »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #218
kidintech wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So you wanted to say "Chinese forums" but couldn't say it out of fear?

no.

I wanted to say Eastern, as I have examples from both Asia and East Europe.

I wished to not be more specific so as to not derail the discussion into "user kidintech implied that nation X has a tendency to cheat".

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#255

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

>because there’s only a handful of companies that pay well

If this was just FAANG I wouldn't even mind it. Bigger compensation means bigger hoops to jump through, artificial or otherwise. At least those bigger companies come with interview guides.

But I've been dropped Leetcode mediums on some Unity game dev jobs barely paying 40/hr with minimal benefits. Game interviews already have an absurd number of topics to try and guess you'll be quizzed on. (last interview wanted low level C memory/bit manipulation question... the one before that did Unreal Engine trivia... then the one before that decided to give me vector math and ray intersection questions), adding in random string manipulation questions when you will barely use more than concatenation on the job doesn't help with studying.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#256

Post by lr4444lr »

kristopolous wrote: post #64
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…

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…

Not my experience at all. Ask a bootcamper a slight variation on a problem they're clearly doing from memory and they fold. Ask a solid CS person, and they usually get intrigued, and dive right in.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#257

Post by begueradj »

Such interviews are made to legally discriminate against old developers.

A freshly graduate student has more chance to still know this or that algorithm, and prepare for that.

An old/experienced developer has dealt with plenty of real world complex problems. So much that his attention is absorbed by them, not by what is the best way to search for an element in a tree.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#258

Post by vundercind »

sensanaty wrote: post #199
XorNot wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you tell them what the "mod" operator is before giving it? The failure rate of FizzBuzz has always struck me as depending on the idea that you can do a lot of programming and just never need that operator.

Yeah I know how to implement FizzBuzz since it's such a meme, but I've basically never used the mod operator in real code. Maybe it comes up in more math-y code I suppose, but for most backend/frontend/SQL code I've never reached for it.

I’ve used it for coloring alternating lines differently in UI code, and as a lazy way to log only every so many times some loop runs.

I only know it well because it was covered near the beginning of one of the first programming books I picked up (on Perl 5) and it stuck with me because it seemed wild to me that they had an operator for that.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#259

Post by sjaak »

XorNot wrote: post #180
sjaak wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do you tell them what the "mod" operator is before giving it? The failure rate of FizzBuzz has always struck me as depending on the idea that you can do a lot of programming and just never need that operator.

No but I permit internet access as long as they don't search for the solution (I trust them not to do that, and don't monitor what they do)

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#260

Post by spacecadet »

Well give how well the FAANGS all turned out, evil-money generating society destroying hell holes... I imagine it actually goes like this:

Im going to randomly and silently draw from one of 3 topics that I understand, but nothing that I don't and would need to collaborate with you to solve. It must be something I have memorized so not to risk looking less smart than the interviewee. Good we have now hired the 10,000th copy of me, the company can now continue to produce the SAME garbage across 10,000 people. I have succeeded and can now be promoted to level 5.5 and 2/5th.

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