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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

#301

Post by Rinzler89 »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #289
Rinzler89 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> And sadly the current market seems to only want A+ candidates.

You mean the current FAANG market paying top dollar. I know plenty of unknown companies taking B candidates because they aren't paying top dollar (in Europe at least)

>Who's fault is it really?

The governments and central banks for devaluing the currency post-2008 with their zero interest rates, causing the value of savings and wages to plummet and the value of assets, housing and stonks to skyrocket, causing people to chase get rich quick schemes on the stock market and on the jobs market. Coupled with the VC promoting for an unsustainable growth (more like pump and dump) of so called "tech companies" who's products were not economically viable from the get go, they just survived on zero-interest money and fake promises, artificially boosting the demand for SW workers casing many young people to go into tech just to chase money, money that's now gone and so is the demand for coders.

Without this artificial demand for devs caused by zero rates and overhype in the tech industry of financially unsustainable products that were banking on skirting the local laws (AirBnB, Uber, etc), then those people chasing money would have went into finance or investment banking to chase money there instead of causing a huge backlog of candidates in tech. Just my 0.02$

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#303

Post by mathgladiator »

369548684892826 wrote: post #56
emodendroket wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the fact that there is a standardized test in my mind does the opposite and makes the process much fairer The problem isn't standardized tests, it's that leetcode questions are about having the time to have learnt the answer beforehand, rather than raw ability for problem solving.

Some of us derive the answer on the spot...

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#304

Post by johnnyanmac »

hcrean wrote: post #287
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.

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…

Honestly sounds like a bad interviewer. repeated subtraction is a good first step and I would try to push more if that was the first implementation. But If you could derive a base 10 remainder you know conceptually what problem the mod operator is trying to solve.

a % b = a - (b * a/b) /assuming a sane language with integer division, else cast a/b to int/

Figuring the above operation (or getting close) is when you should more or less pass, and That's a good point to show the interviewee what the operation is. That should be the point of an interview problem, to show the thought process, not that you know fancy tricks.

But alas, I was shown an XOR swap in an interview last week and spent 3 minutes deriving it on paper instead of 3 seconds saying "oh yeah, a => b and b => a" to a trick that I haven't seen since college some decade ago. The current market loves tricksters, I suppose.

And yes, the actual real world use of modulo is surprisingly sparse, despite easily imagining situations where you could use it.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#305

Post by lll-o-lll »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #247
kristopolous wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 percentil…

Well the thing is, I keep hearing about these people who can't code but excel at leetcode, even that they are mass-trained in some bootcamps, but somehow I never saw one in reality and I interviewed hundreds of people. So I'm kind skeptical this is a real issue. The other way round (people who code, but can't leetcode) I agree it's an issue. Unfortunately as noted here in comments, cost of a bad hire is much much wor…

I think all leetcode gives you is a proxy for IQ in the language of code. If someone excels at leetcode, they should be relatively smart and able to write code.

Excellent! That’s a something, a something you can measure. Back when I was involved in hiring, it was definitely better than not having that (at junior levels).

However, the idea that “IQ is all you need” is so obviously false that I think you need to reconsider. Bill Gates famously, (infamously?), hired for IQ. Microsoft used puzzles as their IQ proxy, and I think leetcode is just a modern variant. Possibly a worse version, as training has a bigger effect.

Bill Gates later would claim that he overvalued intelligence. I would say that intelligence is necessary but insufficient. We would get further, faster, with a quick IQ test and then dig into the candidates experience, communication ability and personality. No need to study!

The FAANG companies all have a line a mile long of candidates willing to put up with any amount of BS for a chance to work for the name and $$. If you aren’t such a company, trying to hire that game changing person for $$’s you can afford to pay is going to require a different approach.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#306

Post by xcv123 »

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…

Memorization of the hashmap package name is the stupidest Java programming test I have ever heard of.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#307

Post by johnnyanmac »

sjaak wrote: post #267
arethuza wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once froze in an interview when asked a simple technical question - I'd been giving a presentation for an hour on how to launch a new product and I was asked by the CEO how to do something technically trivial - my brain could not do it. So he probably thought I was some marketeer pretending to be technical - which isn't really true. I suspect quite a lot of people who are labelled as "can't code" are freezing like…

When I ask people to code FizzBuzz I: - give them ~30 minutes on their own machine - they get to pick the language they code in - I leave the room for large parts of it - I bring them a drink - I tell them I want to see what they can do and that I don't care if they complete it - permit them to search on the internet (as long as they don't copy/paste a solution) I see this usually: - they finish in a few minutes - th…

> permit them to search on the internet

really? they get 30 minutes + internet and they couldn't google "javascript how to get divisible by 3"? That's just bad research at that point.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#308

Post by bena »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #255
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…

If you are applying for game dev jobs, C memory management, the gnarly parts of Unreal engine, vector math, and ray intersection are all things you could be doing on the job.

Game dev is lower paying, less structured, and more involved than typical web dev jobs.

I’d really only want to get into game dev early in my career or as an independent creator. It’s a touch exploitative.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#309

Post by shitlord »

ljm wrote: post #212
mvdtnz wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you cheat at live coding?

I’ve interviewed people who wore an earpiece and were fed instructions on the fly, and also people who kept their cameras turned off to try and hide the fact they were getting assistance. You started picking up on patterns like them repeating your questions, or spending a lot of time in silence (asking their friend a question) without any other communication or activity on the screen. Like they weren’t there.

I once interviewed someone who was on a call with someone but messed up their audio feed. I could hear the third person but the person I interviewed could not.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#310

Post by dkdbejwi383 »

My biggest beef with this style of interview is that someone with commitments (family, sports, hobbies) outside of work, I have no time to study the format, spend months practicing questions, practicing the art of speaking my thoughts in a clear way while actually having time to myself to think and process, understanding the gotchas etc.

luckily, I have experience as a programmer and in a previous career, and have so far managed to mostly avoid it as there are enough companies where I am that I’ve been hired elsewhere. But it does make me wonder if I’ve either missed good opportunities, or am limiting myself for the future.

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