Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

nelson.cloud

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 625 posts

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#421

Post by bluGill »

John23832 wrote: post #321
koolba wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem isn't standardized tests, it's that leetcode questions are about having the time to have learnt the answer beforehand, rather than raw ability for problem solving. This sounds like you want to penalize students who studied for the exams. Or at least not reward them. Like all interview formats, it’s a proxy for understanding if the prospect would be able to get the work done and be a good fit with the re…

Why should a job be an exam? For someone who has worked at both FAANGS and startup, I've never found a job that remotely matches a leetcode problem. Most companies are building products anyway.

The only value in leetcode is you should be able to solve a couple in a short time and thus prove you are least know something about writing code. We use them as an interview prescreen because once in a while someone seems like a good person we would like to work with, but we have no clue after the interview if they can really code.

We had one person who worked on [censored] 20 years ago, then was manager of [non-programmers, rest censored] - now wants to get back into coding - can this person still code? If so I want them, but if they have forgotten everything... I of course censored details for privacy reasons.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#422

Post by johnnyanmac »

raincole wrote: post #251
koliber wrote: post #66

I'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…

To you, someone who doesn't know which namespace HashMap belongs to is like someone who can't do 3 * 7...? Not sure it's a satire about interviewer stereotype or...

in all fairness, Java.util isn't some esoteric namespace. But the fact that you can do years of Java without touching core Java libraries (e.g. maybe you're highly reliant on DI, or have a proprietary library at work) does make it hard to properly gauge with.

I'd say it's a fine question if interviewers stopped treating their technical tests like trade secrets and just said "okay, interview is next week, make sure you know the some the basic built-in Java namespaces and yadda yadda". I can understand wanting to avoid googling, but consider the situations:

- someone truly out of their element won't pass, study or not

- someone who knows the stuff after a quick refresher is a perfectly functioning programmer, it's something all programmers do on the job.

- someone who truly knew nothing but could pass a test in a week is clearly a fast learner, the perfect candidate for many roles with changing demands

- and ofc the best interviewers aren't impacted. Simply more confident.

unless you truly need an expert/principle level engineer in a domain to solve problems (and let's be real: few companies do), I don't see many downsides to this approach.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#423

Post by djeastm »

concordDance wrote: post #121
logicchains wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard leetcode questions hire grinders, not thinkers. Many of those questions were thesis/publication-worthy decades ago when first solved; it's unlikely for even a very intelligent person to produce a similar result in just tens of minutes. So if someone solves it, it's much more likely to be because they saw it or a similar question while grinding practice questions than that they genuinely derived the optimal solut…

I disagree with this. I can solve the majority of leetcode hard problems in under an hour despite not having seen them before and I'm far from the smartest person I've met.

I don't know you or the people you've met, but if you can do this without studying the questions before and the solutions are performant, then I would put you in the "very smart" category

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#424

Post by lordnacho »

He's right to be sick of it. There's no sense in them.

How often do you find an employee who if you'd just asked them an LC, they would not have gotten the job that they have proven themselves incapable of?

The times I've met a programmer that we shouldn't have hired, it could not have been detected by LC. This has tended to be things like "guy does not want to work on this problem" or "this guy is suggesting things that are obviously bad designs, and doing it with an aggressive style". Rather than "if only we'd asked him to implement Dijkstra we would have found out and not hired him".

LC also doesn't ask what you want to know. I don't need to know whether you can solve the Towers of Hanoi. I need to know that if there's a problem we need to solve, and it is a disguised ToH problem, you will recognize that there's an algo to be found, you will eventually find it's this one, and you will eventually find the solution and code it up in a sensible way that helps the team in the future.

LC problems tend to be too short to decide whether someone actually has the skill that I really value, which I guess is gumption. We have a codebase that's become crusty over time, will you take the initiative to clean it up, or will you just solve the little LCs that present themselves and add that to the spaghetti?

The interview form that's worked for me over the last 20 years is simply to have a long technical discussion, meandering across a bunch of technologies and problems. You can't prepare for it, and you can't waste your time preparing for it. Even if you say you touched a bunch of stuff, when you run out of opinions, I will know the depth of your experience. If you have an opinion, you will also know what the orthodoxy is on that area, and you can explain why you agree or disagree. If you are disinterested, it will be clear.

Now of course this isn't going to satisfy people who want something they can call standardized. Maybe a pair of twins will walk in with the same skillset, and one of them veers down one path and the other down another, so that the conversations have different questions. But I would wager that I'd find the same result.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#425

Post by bluGill »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #280
Benjammer wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are we just going with a base assumption that interviewers can NEVER be trusted with anti-bias training and learning how evaluate people fairly? The examples mentioned in this comment section are all blatantly intentional biases that people are choosing to use. The amazing part is that all the “standard test eliminates bias” people seem to the most ignorant to where bias helps THEM. Forcing people to study for two…

>are we just going with a base assumption that interviewers can NEVER be trusted with anti-bias training and learning how evaluate people fairly? Yes. Because interviewing is 1. hard, but no company has proper full time proctors. So "expert interviewers" are a rarity 2. not standardized in the slightest. So your performance varies entirely by the interviewer, their style, and their mood that day. 3. some weird blind…

> 2. not standardized in the slightest. So your performance varies entirely by the interviewer, their style, and their mood that day.

That isn't always true. When I interview HR gives me the exact questions I'm allowed to ask. These are vetted both to prevent me from asking something illegal, and also by research to get the type of things useful for interviews. Sometimes it is annoying - you can easially finish the interview with a great score but I have no clue if you can write code or not. However we are carefully trained on how to ask the questions and how to grade them.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#426

Post by kirth_gersen »

concordDance wrote: post #320
batshit_beaver wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congratulations, you've memorized leetcode patterns. Proves nothing beyond that (except that you've also had the time recently to practice leetcode).

I have never practiced leetcode puzzles or memorised solutions to them. I don't understand why you jumped to this conclusion.

Probably because you said you "can solve the majority of leetcode hard problems in under an hour". That could easily give the impression that you have practiced them. If you haven't practiced them, then how do you know you can solve them?

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#427

Post by willtemperley »

was_in_amazon wrote: post #413
willtemperley wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The so-what was just to confirm that Amazon do leetcode interviews, contrary to your statement.

If you call any coding test "leetcode like interviews" then YES

You're slowly getting it

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#428

Post by bluGill »

vaylian wrote: post #319
hcrean wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I failed FizzBuzz the first time someone gave it to me in an interview... The specific failure was that I first attempted to solve by using repeated subtraction. The guy kept asking me to "solve it a different way", or saying "there is a better way to solve this". I tried using arithmetic tables, I tried using results about base10 remainders and I even tried using one of the corollaries to Fermat's little theorem to…

FizzBuzz is a highly artificial problem. It makes sense that people who are not familiar with it will assume that there is an elegant solution. But in the end the right approach is to be very boring and to notice that you need to check for divisibility with 15 before you check for divisibility with 3 and 5.

FizzBuzz is a problem that doesn't have an elegant solution. That is the point: to see how you approach the problem. (there are 3 possible solutions, each in-elegant in their own way)

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#429

Post by surfingdino »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #373
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...)

The most frustrating thing once you pass those hoops and get onboarded is the look at the repo, outdated "design" docs in Confluence, and a history of trying things out without any plan. But, yeah... solve me a puzzle.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#430

Post by Edd1CC »

halfcat wrote: post #418
Edd1CC wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hillel Wayne did a good "study" on this by speaking to a bunch of engineers who moved into software, engineers who stayed in software, and engineers who only worked in software (yes, you can be a chartered engineer in most Western countries including the US and UK purely from software). The strong consensus was that software is an engineering discipline, and the nitpicking you can have on any particular topic that is…

> The strong consensus was that software is an engineering discipline I see it as a difference in time and stakes. We’ve built bridges and boats for thousands of years, where the outcome of failure is people die. This has a lot to do with why it’s easy to estimate the time and cost to build a house, but it’s a rare shaman who can consistently estimate software projects well. Once we’ve built software for even a few h…

> We’ve built bridges and boats for thousands of years, where the outcome of failure is people die.

We write software that has killed people due to bugs too, such as Therac-25 releasing too much beta radiation killing patients.

> This has a lot to do with why it’s easy to estimate the time and cost to build a house

My parents and in-laws are property developers and I've also been involved in a build; not one was on time or budget. Some are really off budget, beyond the scale software projects that mess up are. In China they've had projects run into the billions and be decades late.

I do understand your points, but this is what I mean when I say you can nitpick any issue with software not being Real Engineering and apply it to other engineering categories too.

But yeah we may have a very different process in 50 or 100 years. I'm only 10 years into my career and it's already pretty different to when I started!

Post reply on HN