When I read posts like this I'm always surprised and confused.
I've had quite a few interviews for software jobs in my life but not a single one was leetcode style or with a whiteboard...
Is this just a cultural difference between countries? (I live in germany) or was I just lucky?
I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
431–440 of 625 posts
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
They do produce plenty of false positives - just not "you hire an idiot" kind. You will hire a person completely unsuitable for the actual job, but is good at leet. Issue is not the lack of intelligence. Issue is not being software engineer despite being good at algorithms. Or not being good at whatever your position requires. I do work in a team where majority was hired by puzzles of sorts. All of them are smart. Th…
Most interview processes I've been through (many, 15 year veteran) involve both the leetcode crap and at least one fit/culture/soft skills round.
The fit/culture/soft skills/ is actually a fall back to "where did you go to college and tell me about how good you are", which was the pre-leetcode standard.
It is a downgrade in my opinion.
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and are asked to solve it. I think this is where our different opinions come from, while we agree on the other aspects. In my personal experience, I have never felt that the hire/no-hire decision relied exclusively on my ability of solving the presented problem; I have passed interviews where I did not solve the LC-style problem optimally but I communicated clearly, picked up on hints, was aware of when I hit "wall…
>Reading through the thread it seems that my experience is not universal, and the majority here have had less pleasant interviews, so I understand where you are coming from. it changes immensely based on the job market. I've defintiely tanked some inerviews hard, stumbling on softball questions that shoulda been a bullet point. But I get pretty far or even gotten offers. The last 12-18 months though? I've had intervi…
> it changes immensely based on the job market.
I dodged the .com bust because I worked for the U.S. DoD at the time.
But I got laid off for the first time during last year's "15% bloodbath".
If I compare my current job search vs. all of my job searches in the past:
(1) As parent comment said, the bar seems to be much higher. I've thought that I did really well on some interviews, only to not get an offer.
(2) Some interview processes are way more rigorous. For a DevTech role within nVidia, I had 12 interviews + 2 take-home problems. (BTW, the take home problems were incredibly fun. Well done nVidia!)
(3) I've finally accepted a job offer from a large, established tech company, and the pre-onboarding process is amazingly slow. I accepted the offer a month ago and still don't have a start date. In a better job market either (a) they'd probably work harder to be good about this stuff, or (b) I'd just take a different job because of the delay.
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#434I 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…
> 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). I've seen this reasoning, but I'm wondering if this is actually true, especially if you also believe the other myth in hiring: most people applying are not qualified for the job. Since most hiring actually requires you to fill the position in the…
> if you also believe the other myth in hiring: most people applying are not qualified for the job.
Depends where you’re looking in the hiring pipeline. If you’re looking at raw applications submitted to a publicly listed job posting, I can say without reservation that the majority of candidates are not qualified. The pre-screening candidate pool is extremely bad on average, especially for remote job listings. Some people spend all day clicking the apply button on every job listing they see.
Your post constrains another misunderstanding about the hiring process: The goal isn’t to hire the first person through the system who is good enough to pass some arbitrary threshold. The goal is collect a number of candidates and hire the best one. People hate this reality, but it’s true.
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#435Leetcode 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 interviewed at a company known for consistently asking one of the same four questions in a specific interview round. These questions were widely shared on forums like Blind, Leetcode, and Glassdoor. The recruiters also provided strong guidance on the type of problems to expect. I prepared thoroughly for all four main questions and any other plausible ones I could think of. I practiced writing solutions to ensure I…
How did you do it without them noticing, you weren't sharing your screen ?
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#436There is a lot of academic research on interviews. I'd like to see one of these blogs actually find and reference it sometime. Instead we get a lot of why someone "feels" something works/doesn't work, but no reason to believe they are correct.
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#437Earlier 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…
> 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.
Hell. What area do you live? Are things that bad or were you just too picky?
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of people couldn’t even read this thread if someone was watching closely. They’d recognize words and idioms, but couldn’t make sense of these or think. It’s called anxiety and rarely has anything to do with actual performance. Anxiety is a frequent guest in a smart guy’s home. As an early 2000s integrator/analytics I learned to write code when someone watches out of interest or straight time pressure (still tax…
I have empathy for the false negatives. I have been them, or maybe at times I'm simply a false positive, the problem is those people are likely to freeze no matter the interview. Further still, I get push back with folks citing self-prescribed medical conditions, but the same people generally display the same behaviours during the working day. So other than contract to hire, which typically limits you to people with…
> I have empathy for the false negatives. I have been them, or maybe at times I'm simply a false positive, the problem is those people are likely to freeze no matter the interview.
I can't speak to the statistical claim that "those people are more likely to freeze no matter the interview."
But just my personal anecdote: I do fine on take-home coding tests, but I freeze up on live-coding tests.
This is one reason I'm vexed by the allegedly common cheating in take-home coding tests. It makes employers suspicious of the testing style that I'm best at.
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#439Such 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?
Most of us. We're not computer scientists, we're programmers.
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#440Earlier 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
I'd consider
- a coding test in a short time frame (30-90 minutes)
- implementing some singular function that expects a singular answer
- expecting time/space complexity optimizations, often those not naively thought about in said short time frame
- in synthesized test environments (as opposed to something representing a real world environment)
to fall under "leetcode like interviews". Log parsing can fall into either camp depending on the prompt. Once it's asking you something esoteric like to locate a timestamp in Log(N) time it starts to fall into Leetcode territory.