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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

#371

Post by CoastalCoder »

boffinAudio wrote: post #71
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)

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 realized that day that I have every right to inspect all aspects of a company that I might work for, and that I don't really have to make compromises if I see something negative during the process.

I think this is really contingent on your negotiating position.

I've been unemployed for over a year. The lower my savings get, the less picky I can be about potential employers.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#372

Post by dkdbejwi383 »

resource_waste wrote: post #101
pkos98 wrote: post #91

Since 99% of people have to study hard to pass LC (medium/hard), it effectively acts as a selector for employee conformity. People who play by the rules imposed upon them, who work long hours if corp wants them to etc. All the talk about diversity, but no diversity of thought. Only LC chasers. I genuinely believe this decreases innovation massively.

>All the talk about diversity, but no diversity of thought. Only LC chasers. I genuinely believe this decreases innovation massively. Nice belief, but good luck proving it. I imagine the people grinding LC are harder working/more innovative than people who watched TV instead.

Why are the two choices LC or TV? What about those who have a family, hobbies, etc?

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#373

Post by AnimalMuppet »

surfingdino wrote: post #146

> "they don’t reflect the actual responsibilities of a software engineering of a job." Exactly. I refuse to do them. Oh, your business is solving basic problems in computer science? I though you were an e-commerce platform that needed cleaning up your APIs and moving to a more efficient DB?

This. Why have an interview filter that isn't based on what you actually need to hire? (And then, probably, complain that you can't find enough good candidates...)

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#374

Post by CoastalCoder »

davedx wrote: post #108
boffinAudio wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah games company interviews can be hilarious. I had an interview for a company in the south of England a long time ago. The first half went okay, then in the second half the whiteboard came out, and I was asked to "implement C++ object oriented method dispatch in C" with a chunky marker pen. I mean, it's not exactly a rocket science question, but it's not easy either (on a whiteboard, with a chunky pen), and in the…

Depending on the specific job role, I actually like that interview question.

It tests knowledge of the C++ vtable and function pointers, which is probably a good marker for intermediate-level C++ knowledge. Especially for debugging some heinous bugs.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#375

Post by beezlebroxxxxxx »

AYBABTME wrote: post #339

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?

> simply self-selecting out of these types of companies via some proxy feature I'm unaware of?

Probably. Most LC interviews are in the early to early-mid career stages and are often at large headcount shops where problems are often solved by throwing man-numbers at a problem. As a result, the shops think: "Why don't we hire more really intelligent people to throw at these problems?" They have lots of postings and then get a lot of applicants. LC then serves them 2 main purposes; 1) a proxy for "intelligent people" that can solve these kind of extremely generalist problems, and 2) a way to cull the herd.

Once you actually need specificity in your hiring, then LC style questions are effectively useless outside of some very unique contexts. That they are so endemic is reflective of how bad almost all companies are at hiring.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#376

Post by wruza »

palata wrote: post #271
wruza wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naive questions ahead, if hires weren’t made scarce by some absurd filter, why would they pay $200-300k extra? Feels like the whole idea of stellar salaries must be based on something stellar. Afair, before Google(?) made it normal, developers were sort of dirt cheap. Weren’t developers in abundance at all times?

The reason they pay $200-300k extra is to attract the best they can. Say you got the same salary working in an ethical company than in a FAANG, would you go for the FAANG? The absurd filter is just some kind of lottery. They could have a different one: at the end of the day, it's only when the person starts working that you can actually see what they are worth. The thing with a filter like this one is that it filters…

I agree with this. But the root commenter talks about it as something these people are worth, when it’s just that - a lottery. A company that has so much money that they don’t know which barrier to put there to stop the flood. You jump through absurd hoops and join the club. Kinda like being accepted into a cool kids league, but activities are the same.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#377

Post by throwaway7ahgb »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #295
KaiserPro wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You cannot categorically claim that LC tests are largely memorization tests rather than raw problem-solving skills If that were the case then a normal, well accomplished software engineer shouldn't need to "grind" leetcode to pass an interview. its just a cargo cult. Getting someone to do a code review is a much much better test of skill: Do they ask questions? are they kind in their assertions? At what point do th…

>If that were the case then a normal, well accomplished software engineer shouldn't need to "grind" leetcode to pass an interview. No, what this shows is that the skill range for accomplished professional software devs is absolutely massive. What these companies want is to find the tail end of this very wide distribution. Leetcode interviews do a decent job at this. If you have been coding for a decade and can't do l…

FWIW I sort of agree with you.

Background:

I'm in a FAANG type company now, a YC company, 3000+ engineers. I'm a Staff SWE with 20+ years of experience (ECE degree) and make $600k+ per year. I've went through the promo cycle here (it sucks).

I can't do any leet hards and can do leet mediums after studying. Some easy's take me a couple of tries. I usually do very poorly in interview coding exercises.

** throwaway , main account is 10+ years old.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#378

Post by CoastalCoder »

pjmorris wrote: post #357

Jerry Weinberg used to run a discussion forum for experienced software development consultants, aggregating many years of experience at many companies building significant projects. 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 i…

That's really interesting.

I'm guessing this works better for consultants than for regular employees, due to employment / tax laws.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#380

Post by KaiserPro »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #49
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…

Bingo. A good hire is a windfall, a bad hire can be an existential threat to the team or the entire company.

> a bad hire can be an existential threat to the team or the entire company.

Totally, but leetcode wont filter them out.

Incompetent is fairly easy to navigate around, pathological bastardness is impossible to work past. I know that some companies use psychometric tests, but they are not based in anything remotely scientific, but are also super easy to game.

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