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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

#331

Post by DonHopkins »

kidintech wrote: post #254
Rinzler89 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

So New York, Boston, Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, New Jersey, Main, Connecticut, Rhode Island, etc?

Or by "cheating" are you specifically referring to the lying cheating treasonous fraud from New York who was just found guilty of 34 felonies to cover up cheating on his wife with a porn star to inflence the election?

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#332

Post by 7thpower »

Tainnor wrote: post #141
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…

> To the company this is acceptable noise, but to the individual, this is costing us 100s of thousands of dollars, because there’s only a handful of companies that pay well and they all have the same interview process. If you want to earn top money, you gotta play the game. This is true in every profession, you think lawyers that want to work at top law firms have it any easier? There's a lot of valid criticism with…

Although I find it disappointing, this is the truth. It is a function of supply and demand. There is always a gating function when you have an abundance of supply; sometimes it is leetcode, sometimes it is school, take home work, resume formatting, a mixture, all of the above, etc.

Everything is a proxy because, in most scenarios, there is no way to understand effectiveness of an employee until they have worked for you for a while.

Of course there are other ways, but they all carry their own risks.

That’s why referrals, imperfect as they are, carry so much sway. In theory they reduce uncertainty and require some expenditure of political capital.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#333

Post by oytis »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #324
jkukul wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A leet-code test would be much more standardized if candidates could solve it at home. Just send me a link to the quiz and let me solve it within a specified time frame. I've done tests like this for some companies. It felt a lot fairer and more closely resembling the actual work environment than live leet-code interviews, with biased interviewer(s) and a stress factor that's not a part of the actual job.

As a hiring manager I HATE leet-code tests, and they do nothing to differentiate candidates, but a take home in the era where people run chatGPT beside the interview window, or have someone else do the interview for them? Not a chance. You are 100% correct that it is way more representative, but the prevalence of cheating is ridiculous.

Take home is fine if you discuss it later in the interview. But also there should be some pre-screening to keep the number of interviewees reasonable.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#334

Post by dep_b »

poisonborz wrote: post #35
boshalfoshal wrote: post #17

I see these posts a lot, and I sort of disagree with where they are coming from so I'll play devils advocate. Leetcode is used to select for one of (or both of these) 2 things for the average IC hire: 1. Do you work hard (i.e a person who studies many problems, memorizes solutions, and regurgitates then) 2. Are you smart (i.e a person who doesn't do any leetcode but knows the fundamentals and can sythesize past knowl…

2. Are you smart (i.e a person who doesn't do any leetcode but knows the fundamentals and can sythesize past knowledge well enough to answer a new question) Leetcode questions can by definition never come close to real life problems - they are simply out of context. Working on a project even a few weeks will grant a smart person any insights he might actually need. The kind of out of the blue puzzle problem a leetcod…

It took Dijkstra an hour to come up with the Dijkstra algorithm. Why would you expect me to do better?

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#335

Post by tgv »

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…

> this is costing us 100s of thousands of dollars

That depends very much on your world view. If you get the job, it would imply you've just cost a lot of other people $100ks. That simply can't be true, because there's a small number of such jobs.

The only way this can possibly hold is if you hold that only the "best" candidate should get the job, and by "best" you mean: the one that gets most of the leetcode questions right. But then there's no us.

Edit: I'm not in favor of leetcode interviews, and I do understand that there's a bias in interviews (which won't go away when you drop the leetcode).

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#336

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

>because a false negative is low cost (maybe you spend 50% longer interviewing candidates)

this would make sense if they filled these positions in 2,3 weeks tops. But that's the insane part; I hear of interviews going on for 6-7 stages now, lasting almost 6-10 weeks. At that point I feel you are no longer avoiding false positives, but simply hiring the most desperate programmers willing to jump the hoops. The best candidates will get an offer mid interview at that rate.

>But just don't! It's fine! just move on,

I've been "just moving on" for some 9 months now. There's only so much morale in a tank, no matter how BS you know the whole process is. I just wanna move on in life, not be bogged down on how many permutations you can color an N x M grid with.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#337

Post by Tao3300 »

CSMastermind wrote: post #51

The important thing to screen a software engineer for is not knowledge but the strength of their problem solving and ability to build mental models of problems. Whiteboard interviews are a good way to evaluate these skills - assuming the candidate hasn't seen this particular problem before and the interviewer understands that this is what they're supposed to look for. Goodhart's law applies - the measure becomes a ta…

> Then over time these grinders get high enough up they start becoming interviewers themselves and they don't understand that they're even supposed to screen for talent, they conduct the interview like a memory test since to them that's what it was.

It follows that better leetcode scoring is a good indicator of who can be replaced with LLM.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#339

Post by AYBABTME »

It's weird to me because I haven't had a single person ask me Leetcode questions, and I never opened Leetcode once in my life. And yet I interviewed plenty and got job offers aplenty. Who asks these questions? I'm I somehow simply self-selecting out of these types of companies via some proxy feature I'm unaware of? Or maybe they stop asking these questions when you're more senior and not fresh out of school anymore?

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#340

Post by perrygeo »

The key point for me is - what does the company value? Don't forget that you are interviewing the company too.

Does this company value grinding at solved problems, rather than actually solving new and interesting ones? That's a dead end. I'd rather talk about how I spent my time building real stuff in prod. That's generally how I respond to leet code challenges, pointing out the existing libraries and tools that already do it and discussing their tradeoffs. Pretty good way to find out they're looking for an actual engineer or a code monkey.

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