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I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
401–410 of 625 posts
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#402I have so far not done a full Leetcode myself and I dont consider it an especially good approach. But I want to share a couple of thoughts. If these interviews in general, follow a form of template as to what they contain, what to expect, how answers should be presented, then studying it, while time consuming is not that hard. It can function as a form of "proof of work". That you took the time to prepare yourself fo…
> then studying it, while time consuming is not that hard.
I’m in a mentoring group that includes a lot of people looking for jobs and studying LeetCode. Two themes that come up over and over again:
1. People overestimate the difficulty of practicing LeetCode. Reddit and other sites make it sound like you need to take 3 months off to grind LeetCode full time, but most people can do 1-2 problems per day in their spare time, lunch break, or other small window of time. You don’t need to do rote memorization of every problem on some list found on the internet.
2. Actual LeetCode interviews are rarely as hard as people expect. People think they’re going to get LeetCode Hard problems that require obscure tricks, but the vast majority are Easy and Medium.
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#403I 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…
At all the companies I’ve run we’ve used a simple whiteboard example for this reason. Don’t worry about typos; how does the person think. “Trick” questions are dumb, but you want to get an idea of if the candidate knows their stuff (and let the candidate know what we’re like — interviewing is a sales process in both directions). If someone asks a question like “is it ok to modify the argument” (or says “I’ll assume I…
That I wouldnt mind. I didnt do a full on CS degree, that never stopped me from being a good contributor to various teams over 8 years. I have learned the best candidates are the ones who like you say are open about how they messed up, and can get along with your team. It takes one toxic dev to ruin productivity for an entire team.
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#404I've interviewed developer candidates who seemed to know a lot of theory, but when it came to write some code, they failed miserably. They could not implement fizz-buzz. Senior Java developers who could not import HashMap without looking it up. It's kind of like math. If you need to multiply 562 * 1041, you should use a calculator. If you need to reach for a calculator to tell me how much 3 * 7 is, I will doubt that…
> could not import HashMap without looking it up
I think this is silly. On its own, you could imagine a kid in college who had just seen an example of HashMap in Java remembering what the import was.
But this isn't the only thing you need in a program. There's going to be many things that are trivial that your program needs, all of which would need to be memorized in your world.
> If you need to multiply 562 * 1041, you should use a calculator. If you need to reach for a calculator to tell me how much 3 * 7 is, I will doubt that you are an expert.
The strange thing about this is, I would expect you to know how to calculate 562 * 1041, in other words the principle of how it works. You might mess up the calculation, but you can't mess up the idea of how long multiplication works. In that context, it is perfectly permissible that you have forgotten some entry in the times table, like 3 * 7.
After all, you are a programmer, you organize calculations, you do not work them out yourself, the computer does that.
> If you need to study graph-traversal algorithms in order to pass, it's probably too leet.
This I agree with. You should know where to find the solution to whatever the issue is, you don't need all the solutions to hand.
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah I know how to implement FizzBuzz since it's such a meme, but I've basically never used the mod operator in real code. Maybe it comes up in more math-y code I suppose, but for most backend/frontend/SQL code I've never reached for it.
Depends on the application. I've written accounting software that makes use of it, along with heavy use of floor() and ceil(), including in SQL.
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#406I 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…
At all the companies I’ve run we’ve used a simple whiteboard example for this reason. Don’t worry about typos; how does the person think. “Trick” questions are dumb, but you want to get an idea of if the candidate knows their stuff (and let the candidate know what we’re like — interviewing is a sales process in both directions). If someone asks a question like “is it ok to modify the argument” (or says “I’ll assume I…
I agree with all of this. Leetcode questions are fine as long as they aren't actually difficult maths puzzles or brain teasers. We also used atoi/itoa loads and it was pretty much the perfect difficulty.
Though I still do start with a short fizzbuzz-level question because you would be surprised how many people fail that and it makes it way less awkward if you start with atoi and they can't write a loop.
If they fail fizzbuzz I generally just turn the interview into a chat or give them easy questions to practice, rather than say "yeah no thanks", because I feel like the latter is a bit mean, and everyone can benefit from interview practice.
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
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”.
It’s actually possible for members of the team to be capable of doing “actual work” in addition to being good communicators.
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#408Let me put this straight. You are just lazy and those interviews are intended to filter out lazy engineers. Training for coding interviews is not a problem. You just need to spend 1-2hr daily and solve couple of hundred leetcode tasks total for less than a year. After this you'll not have any problem with this type of interviews at all. Additionally they boost up your coding skills and problems solving skills. You do not realize it yet because you did not train.
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve interviewed people who wore an earpiece and were fed instructions on the fly, and also people who kept their cameras turned off to try and hide the fact they were getting assistance. You started picking up on patterns like them repeating your questions, or spending a lot of time in silence (asking their friend a question) without any other communication or activity on the screen. Like they weren’t there.
I once interviewed someone who was on a call with someone but messed up their audio feed. I could hear the third person but the person I interviewed could not.
That is hilarious
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
> Leetcode interviews do a decent job at this. I mean it doesn't, because I'm at a FAANG, At a FAANG you are infantalised from the very start, sure you passed a very difficult interview where you have to balance a binary tree efficiently as possible. But you're going to use none of those skills here. what you actually end up doing is copy/pasting some random code you found using internal code search, because the sens…
>But you're going to use none of those skills here.
FAANGs want the top .1% of developers, they don't necessarily need them for most roles. But the point is to hire developers that you could put into any role in the company within reason and have them be successful. 99% of development work at a FAANG is pretty unexceptional and doesn't require exceptional developers. They hire for that exceptional 1%.