The solution is simple: since past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, just let the few top candidates do the (paid) work for a few day/week/months and then keep only the best candidate.
adverse selection
I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
311–320 of 625 posts
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
I once worked with a guy who was an incredibly good developer and I was surprised when he didn't see anything special about the number 64 (i.e. a power of two) - turns out that he'd never done any bit fiddling type work so he hadn't had to think in those terms. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of people hadn't heard of "mod" either....
A huge majority of programming work is basically just CRUD stuff and other data shuffling. It’s not surprising that someone wouldn’t have needed to work with big shifting (or modulus) in that case.
He was an expert in complex multi-organisation enterprise integration and was the go to guy to work out why horrific distributed transactions were failing... He also did a lot of cool stuff as side projects in his own time - just none of them happened to involve worrying about powers of 2.
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#313It seems to me that while passing a leetcode question shows that you might know a thing or two, not passing one doesn't really show the opposite. You could be the smartest / greatest coder ever and you just got a really unlucky question... Or it could be that you're not great when you are nervous, etc...
Also, a lot of the time it feels like the answer to most leetcode problem is some sort of trick.... and if you think of it you are golden and if you don't it sucks to be you. Most of the time I'm trying to write code that is NOT tricky... So in some ways I think the job itself will train you to seek simple clean solutions as opposed to tricks.
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#314I quite like them. You know what sort of question you’re getting and they’re really not that hard. Practice. Get good at walking trees. Answer too slow? Sort the list first, use two pointers, use a hashmap, max heap…
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#315Leetcode 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…
It's also a great way to filter out anyone who has any kind of commitment like kids, aging parents to take care of, or have health issues themselves that makes it hard to cram leet code non stop on top of a busy career.
For companies this is very rational, you want non-distracted employees who can work over time.
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#316All the worst kinds of engineers, the kinds of people that talk big and deliver small and slow, the people I know I’ll need to go and fix code for, they are always the ones that work on leetcode the most. These are the false positives that people pretend don’t get through with leet code interviews, the kind of people that don’t understand how node async actually works but can reverse a tree optimally off the top of their head.
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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...
For the hashmap problem, sure. Any SWE worth their salt should be able to figure those out.
I highly doubt you are sight-reading atomic bomb LC hards.
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#318Leetcode 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…
> there’s only a handful of companies that pay well
with all due respect I believe this is about as far from the truth as it gets. I believe the issue is that people think they have to work at FAANGs in order to be paid REALLY well which is just nuts.
I know many people making (very) high 6 figures working at places most have never heard of. instead of looking for FAANGs people should be looking at companies that have been in business for 20+ years (if publicly-traded company the easiest "measure" would be whether you would invest your own dough into that company) and then make your self indispensable there (this is much easier than it sounds) to a point where you are more valuable to the company they company is to you. This is un-achievable at FAANG but this should be everyone's career goal. once you are worth more to a company then company is to you, compensation-wise sky is the limit :)
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#319Earlier 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…
FizzBuzz is a highly artificial problem. It makes sense that people who are not familiar with it will assume that there is an elegant solution. But in the end the right approach is to be very boring and to notice that you need to check for divisibility with 15 before you check for divisibility with 3 and 5.
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree with this. I can solve the majority of leetcode hard problems in under an hour despite not having seen them before and I'm far from the smartest person I've met.
Congratulations, you've memorized leetcode patterns. Proves nothing beyond that (except that you've also had the time recently to practice leetcode).
I have never practiced leetcode puzzles or memorised solutions to them. I don't understand why you jumped to this conclusion.