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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

#361

Post by beezlebroxxxxxx »

cranium wrote: post #279
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…

I know people in the four quadrants of {no-hire, hire} x {would not pass LC, would pass LC}. In my world, conditioning on [would pass LC] does not improve the hire odds. Even worse: it misses out on the hire people with no formal training too busy to waste time on skills with little use outside of the interview (in the real world, they'd use a library).

Spend enough time around hiring teams or recruiters and you'll see that 99% of them are simply very bad at hiring. They put almost no effort into a search. They can definitely find someone. But finding someone that is hired for their actual ability to solve the problems that the shop or team is working on is rare. Leetcode is just a way of culling the herd. The idea that it somehow reflects the requirements of the job are a useful fiction to obscure how little effort most teams and shops actually put into hiring.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#362

Post by was_in_amazon »

willtemperley wrote: post #151
was_in_amazon wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ex Amazon here. I never heard of leetcode style interviews at Amazon.

I would also be a lot richer if I was able to create BS of this magnitude but I can't. Here's the practice test they gave me: https://www.hackerrank.com/test/63ek10mhil5/60d306ab105867d8...

So what? The log parsing thing is a reasonable question, not some obscure bitshift find-a-binary-paindrome hack.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#363

Post by slavapestov »

hobs wrote: post #341
martindbp wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's really not that rational unless you want someone only familiar with being the top code monkey. In all my years of sw dev the number of times that would have helped vs being able to communicate and manage expectations across a swath of people is like 1:1000.

To be fair, you need at least one person on the team to do the actual work, while everyone else is “communicating and managing expectations”.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#364

Post by gorbachev »

pprotas wrote: post #291
begueradj wrote: post #257

Such interviews are made to legally discriminate against old developers. A freshly graduate student has more chance to still know this or that algorithm, and prepare for that. An old/experienced developer has dealt with plenty of real world complex problems. So much that his attention is absorbed by them, not by what is the best way to search for an element in a tree.

Age does not hinder you in solving leetcode problems

The older you are, the more you realize leetcode is like 0.0000001% of what anyone does at an actual software engineering job, and you optimize to ignore that bullshit entirely.

There are exceptions, of course. But for a very large majority of software engineering jobs leetcode is completely useless.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#365

Post by mihaitodor »

5 years later, I still refuse to do them and I don't want to put myself through that process ever again. I got bullied, harassed, laughed at and taunted by people who use this as a one-hour game of kicking people around and I'm not interested in entertaining them any more. I have the following disclaimer both on my LinkedIn [1] and GitHub [2] profiles because I had plenty of surprise-leetcode interviews, so I want to make it clear up front what's acceptable and what isn't.

> I have a personal policy against any type of live coding or online coding tests during interviews and I don't enjoy or engage in any form of competitive programming. Otherwise, I am happy to work offline on coding assignments with reasonable goals and deadlines and to have in-depth technical discussions about software architecture and design as well as relevant technologies.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/mtodor

[2] https://github.com/mihaitodor

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#366

Post by slavapestov »

begueradj wrote: post #257

Such interviews are made to legally discriminate against old developers. A freshly graduate student has more chance to still know this or that algorithm, and prepare for that. An old/experienced developer has dealt with plenty of real world complex problems. So much that his attention is absorbed by them, not by what is the best way to search for an element in a tree.

The whole point of being an “experienced developer” is that you know more than the new grad. What kind of experienced developer forgets basic computer science on top of which all else is built?

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#367

Post by johnnyanmac »

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 keep hearing about these people who can't code but excel at leetcode

I think the mass trained at bootcamp is an exaggeration. The best bootcampers are those that use it as an extended education from learning the traditional ways. I'm sure most people here complaining about leetcode can indeed spend 6 weeks there and be interview ready. But few have that time nor spare cash lying around for such a venture. And why should we need to spend thousands just to ace a quiz like it's some SAT?

>cost of a bad hire is much much worse than cost of a no-hire, so it's the price I'm willing to pay.

At this point I wonder. Hearing way more stories about "survivors" from layoffs burning out from jobs that keep promising that they'll hire more staff to help out with. When in reality they have a hiring freeze or are trying to offshore the work that ends up needing more time to be fixed.

The stalls in a no-hire aren't just costing money in the lack of productivity, it's costing currently working employees who are doing 2,4, 8+ jobs without any meaningful increase in role/salary. It's not sustainable. You're draining a little bit of blood from a rock, but the rock is clearly starting to crumble.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#368

Post by CoastalCoder »

weatherlite wrote: post #181
apples_oranges wrote: post #38

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)

Done a similar thing in a Zoom interview. I had a horrible hard Leetcode question, was completely stuck and was getting nowhere (neither did the interviewers seemed keen on helping me out). I told them hey thanks this isn't my day I want to quit the interview - at this point they really tried hard to make me stay for the rest of the time. I think if a candidate wants out - you should let him.

I'm curious what motivated their attempts to keep you there. I can think of several possibilities.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#369

Post by JKCalhoun »

begueradj wrote: post #257

Such interviews are made to legally discriminate against old developers. A freshly graduate student has more chance to still know this or that algorithm, and prepare for that. An old/experienced developer has dealt with plenty of real world complex problems. So much that his attention is absorbed by them, not by what is the best way to search for an element in a tree.

I know what you're saying but I don't think there is any kind of nefarious backroom discussion that goes on to this purpose.

I think more likely though are the accidental favoritism in the industry where engineers submit resumes of other engineers they know who are looking for a job who, surprise, are also white males.

I don't believe it is either racist or sexist however. It's just "who people know". Nonetheless, you're going to build a hive-minded team if you don't go out of your way to break these patterns.

Perhaps similarly leetcode interviews come about from engineers who were leetcode interviewed. Again, no need to jump to ageism as the cause.

(And if anything I think it may have turned a corner where the older devs may have more experience with interesting algorithms that, I don't know, might not be taught any longer in CS?)

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#370

Post by TrackerFF »

slavapestov wrote: post #347

Basic coding problems involving data structures and algorithms are table stakes for a programmer. This whole thread is embarrassing.

I would not call LeetCode hard questions "basic coding problems".

Furthermore, asking (senior) engineers arbitrary and esoteric CS questions that

A) They may have never seen before

B) They will likely never encounter

Seems like a good way to lose out on competent candidates

If I hire an experienced electrical engineering project manager, I don't ask them to analyze convoluted circuits or random differential equations on the whiteboard.

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