I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

The reason they pay $200-300k extra is to attract the best they can. Say you got the same salary working in an ethical company than in a FAANG, would you go for the FAANG?

The absurd filter is just some kind of lottery. They could have a different one: at the end of the day, it's only when the person starts working that you can actually see what they are worth.

The thing with a filter like this one is that it filters out a whole category of people who may actually be good. And it reinforces itself: you hire people who are good at leetcode, who will themselves possibly be good at hiring people who are good at leetcode. Does a company of leetcoders perform better than a company made of a diversity of good engineers? Not clear.

Yes that sounds pretty sensible.

Do you ever have a conversation with these people as to why they think they couldn't do it?

>This sounds like you want to penalize students who studied for the exams. Or at least not reward them.

Interviews are like exams but you don't have any clue what topics are on the test. If Leetcode was some licensed, standardized approach to getting some license to verify my ability to code myself out of a paper bag: I'd hate it, but I'd grit my teeth and study it. exams can be studied for.

But it isn't, so I can be studying leetcode questions and be hit by a dozen other topics. I don't have time to study everything, and the market right now isn't worth pinpointing specific companies unless you have a stellar reference.

>I’d say it’s a pretty good proxy for work ethic at crunch time as well.

I couldn't disagree more. Someone so prepared for interviews have the least skin in the game. Layoffs come and they didn't work > 40 hours but were otherwise excellent? oh well, get another job in a month because interviews are a breeze for them because they breathe DS&A.

>why would a company want to hire someone who has external obligations?

I'd love to know the answer here as well. Why do companies internally penalize workers who were laid off, but then try to "steal" currently happy employees but make them jump through these hoops? The logic seems backwards; interviews should be hard and depress wages for the laid off, desperate workers so you can get a desperate unicorn. But you want someone who lacks the time to study because of current job obligations to get to an offer faster. Their proof of work ethic is being employed to begin with.

God I hate these interviews.

I'm 45, focus on Web development, have worked in-house on teams building ecomm carts/solutions for multi-million dollar per ear local companies, in design agencies focusing on custom $100k or templated $5k Wordpress websites, and have freelanced for everything in-between.

During COVID lockdown, I got burnt out at my existing employer, resigned, and took several months of. When I started looking for work again, one potential employer was a Wordpress 'freelance' company that gave me a LC test as a second round interview.

I BOMBED - like a 27%. I've been building sites and web applications for 15+ years and had zero idea what I was even being asked in any of the 3 questions on the 'test'. The company ended the interview process and advised I study Leet Code for 1 month and come back to re-test since my experience was outstanding for what they were looking for.

I did and got an even WORSE score: 13%. I spent way to much time on trying to cram useless (for my daily work) programming techniques to pass a useless interview test when I was told I had the experience they wanted - I've built custom WP solutions/themes/plugins since wordpress first rolled out.

TLDR: With 15+ years experieince in Web development, I still couldn't score higher than a 27% on a LeetCode test and got halted in the interview process for a position I was told I was WELL qualified for.

LeetCode tests for non-overly-technical positions is awful.

I know people in the four quadrants of {no-hire, hire} x {would not pass LC, would pass LC}. In my world, conditioning on [would pass LC] does not improve the hire odds.

Even worse: it misses out on the hire people with no formal training too busy to waste time on skills with little use outside of the interview (in the real world, they'd use a library).