351–360 of 625 posts
The unfortunate reality is that If you don't do this you'll hire people who can't program
This is so true. You see it when you are on the hiring end. There are all kinds of people out there. I fully expect every hireable programmer to be able to set up a class, instantiate it, and use types. A lot of people are not even at that level. They know just enough to be dangerous.
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Ex Amazon here. I never heard of leetcode style interviews at Amazon.
I literally interview on purpose with Amazon to waste their time (revenge for them mistreating my partner). After at least 10 full onsites, I can tell you that Amazon uses leetcode style interviews in every single one of those onsites. Feels nice to come into their stupid contrived behaviorals and not even care about the “Star” method or their stupid leadership principals. I even straight up told them in one intervie…
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 alre…
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…
I do not know how hiring is done at megacorps; but on the few occasions I participated in tech interviews, we were looking for candidates to join the team that I was on. So, what I was interested about the candidates was how well they were prepared for the kind of work our team does; and how much I would like to work with them. I am sure this second question introduces all sorts of subjective biases; but then, hey, aren't you going to spend countless future hours with that person? At least the first concern incentivised us to make sure candidates were sufficiently competent. BTW, we didn't ask leetcode-type questions.
> 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
I am not sure I am following the argument. If there is only a handful of companies that pay well, and if you only consider companies out of that list for employment, isn't it reasonable to predict that there will be lots of other candidates who want the same, far more than the number of available positions at those companies. How, then, should those companies select from such a pool of candidates?
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Do you tell them what the "mod" operator is before giving it? The failure rate of FizzBuzz has always struck me as depending on the idea that you can do a lot of programming and just never need that operator.
No but I permit internet access as long as they don't search for the solution (I trust them not to do that, and don't monitor what they do)
I once had an interview that I really liked. It was for a bank. They give the candidate some messy, done-in-a-hurry code (but not purposefully obfuscated) and ask them to refactor it to the best of their ability. The interviewer sits next to the candidate and talks to them throughout the whole process. It's pretty much pair programming, but the candidate has the initiative. I found it to be a breath of fresh air afte…
What's super interesting is I have actually had people pretty much fail the basic stuff (which was probably nerves) and then go on and kill the code review section in ways that shows their serious expertise.
IMO interviews are pretty bad at demonstrating people's ability to work, but if you can zoom in and out on a problem and do good enough on the coding stuff its usually a win.
Their consensus opinion was that a 'work sample test' was the most reliable means of assessing whether potential hire would be a good fit. Bring the person in and pay them to work with you, in your environment, on tasks parallel to what is needed, for a short period (anywhere from half a day to a consulting engagement) and base your decision on what you learn.
It is a really strong positive signal about a company if you see them doing this.
A friend once in the middle of a technical interview stopped speaking, stood up and went out. They ran after him, "what's wrong, you're doing fine!" and he told them it depresses him too much and he's not interested anymore. Sad, given that this is a fun profession for most of us (I assume)
I've done the same thing, at a games company well-known for its perks and benefits, but also its crazy production schedules .. I thought I wanted to work there, and up until about half-way through the interview, I did, but then out came the whiteboard and in came the peers to see me implement basic things in pen, and actually it felt like a ritualized mobbing, because as I progressed through their challenges, things…
I laughed when I read that - turning around the same BS they spew for why they claim they didn't hire someone.
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I believe this is a common myth. I've spend around seven years teaching programming and people who can go from zero to decent problem solving in just six weeks are virtually non-existent. Either it wasn't a true "zero" but rather they were really good e.g. at advanced math or physics and managed to see some parallels, or it has to be a genius. I'd be very interested in hiring such a person.
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…
I could be wrong, but I think dynamic-programming problems belong in that list.
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> If your complaint is that a normal person wouldn’t have the time to study these things in detail, why would a company want to hire someone who has external obligations? External obligations like full time employment and a family?
Yes exactly. All things being equal, I’d rather higher someone who’s going to dedicate his entire life to the soul crushing work he will be assigned.