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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

#281

Post by sensanaty »

The best interview I ever had was with GitLab, where they make a realistic PR/MR (but one that is obviously not actual code they'd use for anything, for the ones worried about doing free work for them) and you have to review it. It's exactly what I do at the actual job at least 50% of the time, and I'm sure from their side it gives them a lot of room to look into how the candidate works/communicates.

They then ruined it by still having a leetcode style interview afterwards which I found monumentally stupid, but oh well.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#282

Post by chmod775 »

They're fine to filter fresh university graduates.

But if you have any sort of track record (previous employment/projects you can talk about, active github account), they're just insulting. They shouldn't be wasting your time if they could just have a look at the things you accomplished.

That there's companies who make all interviewees take them just means there's not enough competent software developers with sufficient self respect to just refuse that kind of nonsense.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#283

Post by palata »

resource_waste wrote: post #88
watwut wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>They are not software engineers and it shows massively. Coming from Real Engineering and making 2x more programming, I lol at people who say there is any Engineering in software. We are programmers dealing with layers upon layers of abstraction. Knowing to optimize for time by using vectors is more of an art, than a science. I did do safety critical C code and Assembly which are probably my hole in the whole 'its no…

> Coming from Real Engineering

One related problem I see is that Computer Science tends to be under-estimated by other engineering fields. A ton of software engineers did not study software. They learned to program as part of their engineering studies, and they believe that they learned both Computer Science and their engineering topic at the same time.

I may be biased, but I see fewer computer scientists pretend to be mechanical engineers because they once tuned a PID.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#284

Post by johnnyanmac »

Aunche wrote: post #104
Benjammer wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are we just going with a base assumption that interviewers can NEVER be trusted with anti-bias training and learning how evaluate people fairly? The examples mentioned in this comment section are all blatantly intentional biases that people are choosing to use. The amazing part is that all the “standard test eliminates bias” people seem to the most ignorant to where bias helps THEM. Forcing people to study for two…

> Forcing people to study for two months is blatantly discriminatory to age and family status, at a systemic level. How is this any less discriminatory than any other assessment based interview where you need to prepare? Non-assessment based interviews end up being vibes based which is much more discriminatory.

>any other assessment based interview where you need to prepare?

because most other assessment based interviews are based on what you do on the job, likely stuff you've done at previous jobs as well. Less prep time when you spent thousands of hours already as a career.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#285

Post by johnnyanmac »

kidintech wrote: post #100
boshalfoshal wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, but I don't really see how this invalidates the style of interviews where you're presented with some timeboxed coding problem (of reasonably scaled difficulty) and are asked to solve it. There will be bad actors regardless of the interview style, thats why companies have multiple interview types/styles/rounds to sus out a candidate, as you probably know. If they BSed their way through a leetcode int…

> and are asked to solve it. I think this is where our different opinions come from, while we agree on the other aspects. In my personal experience, I have never felt that the hire/no-hire decision relied exclusively on my ability of solving the presented problem; I have passed interviews where I did not solve the LC-style problem optimally but I communicated clearly, picked up on hints, was aware of when I hit "wall…

>Reading through the thread it seems that my experience is not universal, and the majority here have had less pleasant interviews, so I understand where you are coming from.

it changes immensely based on the job market. I've defintiely tanked some inerviews hard, stumbling on softball questions that shoulda been a bullet point. But I get pretty far or even gotten offers.

The last 12-18 months though? I've had interviews that felt like a dream but got zero follow up to. Been ghosted after seemingly final rounds where I spent 5+ hours on technical tests. It's not even enough to "understand the problem and communicate steps". You gotta be flawless, and you still might be cut compared to 3 years ago where a "C" performance could still land multiple offers as long as your experience made up for the quiz questions.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#286

Post by kidintech »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #272
kidintech wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Out of curiosity, can you share some examples from eastern Europe? Where does one find such websites? Also, IMHO, blanket generalizations like "Asia" and "Eastern Europe" in such contexts can actually be more offensive than just mentioning the one country where the thing happens since you're basically painting with tar a whole sub-continent with dozens of different countries, just for the things happening in one coun…

No, because I feel like mentioning previous employers AND mentioning the languages I speak would get quite specific.

You are interested in Eastern Europe, so you should be familiar with olympiads; ask around any circle of ex-olympiad participants and you are bound to find something.

I am not sorry if you took offense; you're either from one of these countries and are clueless to the circles that exist next to you, or you are not from one of these countries and are trying to be offended on behalf of others.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#287

Post by hcrean »

sjaak wrote: post #124
ownagefool wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I failed FizzBuzz the first time someone gave it to me in an interview...

The specific failure was that I first attempted to solve by using repeated subtraction. The guy kept asking me to "solve it a different way", or saying "there is a better way to solve this". I tried using arithmetic tables, I tried using results about base10 remainders and I even tried using one of the corollaries to Fermat's little theorem to speed it up for larger inputs... every time I was told I was getting it wrong because "there was a better solution". In the end he pointed out that the only solution he would accept was use of the mod operator.

Since then I have actively kept a tally: I naturally use the mod operator an average of twice a calendar year, it has always been in personal life code when dealing with complicated geometry problems, the bit of code containing it almost always fails on some edgecase because at the point of using mod it is convoluted.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#288

Post by ljm »

lupusreal wrote: post #140
resource_waste wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They are not software engineers and it shows massively. Coming from Real Engineering and making 2x more programming, I lol at people who say there is any Engineering in software. We are programmers dealing with layers upon layers of abstraction. Knowing to optimize for time by using vectors is more of an art, than a science. I did do safety critical C code and Assembly which are probably my hole in the whole 'its no…

The fact that in 99% of cases "software engineer" is just an aggrandizing title given by management to any and every programmer at their company should put a bullet in the head of the pretentions of this being an engineering field.

The term is used ubiquitously in the field of technology and has been for a long time. We also have Tech or Software Architects, and quite obviously they don't do Real Architecture™ or civil engineering, but the concept makes sense.

It's just a job title, arguably one without the protections or standards afforded to chartered engineers, and with an incredibly low barrier to entry. Pretty much the reason we have to do this ridiculous dance with tech tests, LeetCode, and 12 stage interview processes.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#289

Post by johnnyanmac »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #272
kidintech wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Out of curiosity, can you share some examples from eastern Europe? Where does one find such websites? Also, IMHO, blanket generalizations like "Asia" and "Eastern Europe" in such contexts can actually be more offensive than just mentioning the one country where the thing happens since you're basically painting with tar a whole sub-continent with dozens of different countries, just for the things happening in one coun…

Yeah, there's also the implication here that Americans rarely cheat. They aren't as public because English is under a microscope, but there are definitely answer banks if you know the right person and can fork over the cash.

If it's anything like High School/College, the sad part is these kinds of people could probably do well in interviews regardless. These answer banks are simply the difference between an A and an A+. And sadly the current market seems to only want A+ candidates. Who's fault is it really?

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