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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

#461

Post by blitzar »

zabzonk wrote: post #134
blitzar wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

them: idk I am just the HR person, I dont know what we actually do here or what a linked list is.

me interviewing at big 6 accountancy firm as a software developer: hr: you have do the same tests as the accountants me: ok, hit me .....scribble scribble hr: you have simultaneously managed to get the lowest ever score on the arithmetic tests and 100% on the visual/spacial IQ tests, which no-one has ever done. says something about me i suppose! and they hired me.

I wonder what the accountants get on the leetcode questions

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#462

Post by FabHK »

Aurornis wrote: post #434
NhanH wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

> and hire the best one

Or rather: the best fit. You don't need a Turing Award winner to clean up your website.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#463

Post by FabHK »

beej71 wrote: post #445
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #49

Earlier 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.

But you hired them at-will, right? The bad hires I've seen that are existential threats were only there because management refused to fire them.

Depends on the jurisdiction, needless to say. I've interviewed in London, say.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#464

Post by CoastalCoder »

simplefish wrote: post #240
dinobones wrote: post #6

Leetcode 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…

> What is this interview process meant to demonstrate?

IIUC, the interview deviated from the company's interview policies.

Could the answer simply be that the company has no intentions regarding the aberrant interview process that you experienced?

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#465

Post by zabzonk »

blitzar wrote: post #461
zabzonk wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

me interviewing at big 6 accountancy firm as a software developer: hr: you have do the same tests as the accountants me: ok, hit me .....scribble scribble hr: you have simultaneously managed to get the lowest ever score on the arithmetic tests and 100% on the visual/spacial IQ tests, which no-one has ever done. says something about me i suppose! and they hired me.

I wonder what the accountants get on the leetcode questions

that was exactly my question at the time!

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#466

Post by Aurornis »

kamaal wrote: post #459
palata wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

LeetCode is a filter mechanism, not an entire interview system.

The big companies that have LeetCode in their process also have system design, behavioral, resume review, and experience review as part of the process.

I’m sure some bad companies are using LeetCode as the entire interview process, but it’s not how it’s normally used.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#467

Post by FabHK »

breckenedge wrote: post #387
NhanH wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

In my years of hiring experience, it doesn't hold up. I've hired folks who could leet code all day long, but couldn't develop a feature from scratch, or figure things out without enormous hand holding. I want to hire problem solvers who also know how to code. I stopped doing leet-code interviews about 7 years ago. By all means have people code in interviews, but don’t do leet code.

How do you test whether they're problem solvers that also know how to code, without leet-code interviews?

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#468

Post by yieldcrv »

fzeroracer wrote: post #12

Leetcode interviews are in general just incredibly poor signal-to-ratio; especially with the advent of LLMs making it easier than ever to just cheat on the problem. I would just generally assume that any company with that as an initial barrier isn't actually looking to hire anyone at all, but for the sake of 'appearing' to have employee growth.

I’ve seen many companies try to do something more relevant in the technical interview, it still suffers from “which data structure manipulation method happens to be available in this framework and have you seen it recently”

Regarding “cheating” with an LLM, there is not unanimous consensus on that either. I’ve been in technical interviews where the collaborative coding tool had an LLM built right in, and I was encouraged to use it. If thats what I’m going to do at the company then demonstrating problem solving that way is useful.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#469

Post by FabHK »

Suzuran wrote: post #400
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…

That false negative can be pretty damn expensive if the good engineer you didn't hire could have saved your ass from the situation the less-good engineer you did hire couldn't handle.

The latter would be a false-positive, which by assumption is both expensive and rare.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#470

Post by CoastalCoder »

mihaitodor wrote: post #365

5 years later, I still refuse to do them and I don't want to put myself through that process ever again. I got bullied, harassed, laughed at and taunted by people who use this as a one-hour game of kicking people around and I'm not interested in entertaining them any more. I have the following disclaimer both on my LinkedIn [1] and GitHub [2] profiles because I had plenty of surprise-leetcode interviews, so I want to…

I like the idea of your approach. Can you share anything about how well it's worked out for you?

My main concern is that with the allegedly rampant cheating on take-home assignments, the number of employers willing to use them may drop precipitously.

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