This is a place small companies can get an edge, I feel. They don't have a zillion applicants, so they can be more hands-on in the interview process, and the interview process itself isn't clogged with years of cruft. They don't have to rely on "good enough" weedouts like Leetcode.
I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
451–460 of 625 posts
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 i…
That makes sense for soft questions. But I doubt it's HR devevloping a dynamic programming problem and writing a rubric for how good a score you can give based on a response.
I was mostly referring to technical tests, but I understand there are definitely some set of questions you need to ask no matter what. I don't really knock recruiters too much for repeating the usual "are you authorized to work in the US" kinda stuff even though it is the first question on their job application.
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Totally, but leetcode wont filter them out.
Coding challenges won’t filter every pathological bad hire, but coding challenges do catch a lot of bad hires.
LeetCode shouldn’t be the entirety of the interview. It’s just part of it.
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I've actually had people cheat on live coding sessions.
For north of $2m over your career, cheating probably is the smart thing to do, especially for a borderline candidate, as there's a fair amount of evidence that the prestige on your CV will make things easier going forward.
However, my problem with take homes was never that the candidate would cheat, but rather they'll probably spend way more time than the 2 hours allocated.
I'm actually less worried about the candidate doing that, than I'm worried that the interviewer bakes in a bunch of assumptions like having a machine setup to do the task, having the specific domain knowledge and experience, and then accidentally trolls the candidate with little to no avenue for feedback.
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are applying for game dev jobs, C memory management, the gnarly parts of Unreal engine, vector math, and ray intersection are all things you could be doing on the job. Game dev is lower paying, less structured, and more involved than typical web dev jobs. I’d really only want to get into game dev early in my career or as an independent creator. It’s a touch exploitative.
It sure is. I could also be questionied on: - CPU/GPU architecture - graphics/shader programming ( I do enjoy graphics programming, but I have been asked these questions despite not applying for graphics roles) - GPGPU - traditional software engineering (programming patterns, architecture) - netcode (I never applied to a network engineering position. I in fact actively avoid that part of the stack) - general industry…
Fair enough man. I've done hobbyist game development, independent game development, and applied to some shops myself early on. But eventually, you get a job and your path diverges, etc, etc. Like, I'm not anywhere I'd imagine I'd be when I was in school.
I think at least half of all programmers got into it because of video games. They know it's desirable, so they can filter almost as hard as they want.
Like, the industry is just way more jacked up than general software development. I understand your pain.
Although, if you're currently between jobs right now, you could crank out a prototype of something and see where it takes you while job hunting. Because you will always feel like you could use just a bit more time. Sometimes you just gotta do it.
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#456Leetcode 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…
> A way to suppress wages and job mobility for SWE. Who wants to switch jobs when it means studying for a month or two?
If what Google search tells me is true the average SWE tenure is only a couple of years or so.
I might need a month or two of study (or more!) to be able to handle the harder Leetcode problems, but if I was expecting to have to do this every couple of years or so I'd consider taking some steps to maintain that knowledge between jobs.
That would probably be considerably less overall effort than forgetting it and having to cram for months every couple of years.
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#457Everyone thinks they are google, if you are like 90% of tech companies and have a crud app, maybe a couple mobile apps and a few backend systems and admin tools, a radical idea is to involve your engineers in the interview design process and tailor your interview to the actual job they will actually be doing. Front end engineer and your stack is react? Pair with them on fixing a UI bug, backend engineer in rails, pai…
Most people doing the interviews are not qualified to do interviews. At least most of the time in my experience.
It doesn't help that so many companies think they have slick ways to root out better qualified people when most are just a waste of time.
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#458Earlier 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…
> Say you got the same salary working in an ethical company than in a FAANG, would you go for the FAANG?
Very much a tangent, but what do you mean by a company being "ethical"?
I have a few concerns about how that term is often used in these discussions:
(1) it's treated as a binary quality, rather than some kind of continuum, and
(2) there's rarely a recognition that different persons have different conceptions of what's ethical, let alone a justification for what the writer's preferred definition is uniquely superior.
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#459I once had an interview that I really liked. It was for a bank. They give the candidate some messy, done-in-a-hurry code (but not purposefully obfuscated) and ask them to refactor it to the best of their ability. The interviewer sits next to the candidate and talks to them throughout the whole process. It's pretty much pair programming, but the candidate has the initiative. I found it to be a breath of fresh air afte…
> because they know what exact technologies they are using and they don't need to measure candidate's ability to learn new tech, etc Well leetcode interviews do not measure the candidate's ability to learn new tech either, do they?
Leetcode is mostly small time snippets, that tests how intelligently you can write nested for loops and if statements. That's mostly it.
If you are looking to hire people to write < 50 line snippets, it works fine. Pretty much useless for everything else.
Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I've actually had people cheat on live coding sessions. For north of $2m over your career, cheating probably is the smart thing to do, especially for a borderline candidate, as there's a fair amount of evidence that the prestige on your CV will make things easier going forward. However, my problem with take homes was never that the candidate would cheat, but rather they'll probably spend way more time than the 2 hour…
> I've actually had people cheat on live coding sessions.
What tipped you off?
Also, I'm curious: do you think having them discuss their solution in depth would have been a good countermeasure?