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

471–480 of 625 posts

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#471

Post by FabHK »

watwut wrote: post #77
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…

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…

So how do you find, in an interview setting, good software engineers? (And better than with LeetCode-style questions?)

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#472

Post by palata »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #458
palata wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

The beauty of it is that my question is still valid :-). Let me rephrase it:

Say you got the same salary working in a company that you found more ethical, would you go for the FAANG?

Everyone is different, but it's amazing how many excuses we can find to justify doubling/tripling our salary :-).

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#473

Post by racional »

jWhick wrote: post #222

I've found most of ukranians as well as russians love this style of interviews. I've also found them to be bad contributors to teams I've worked in.

If there's an inference to be drawn here -- it's probably that fans of LeetCode-style interviewing tend to be not such great teammates for a variety of reasons; not persons from a certain countries.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#474

Post by hackinthebochs »

KaiserPro wrote: post #443
hackinthebochs wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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%.

> FAANGs want the top .1% of developers, FAANGS want a load of loyal, naive people who are willing to work loads of overtime and not ask too many questions. Who better than posh kids from great universities who haven't quite figured out that life isn't a meritocracy yet!? Sure they also want the top 0.1%, but they have a different interview track. Do you think all those OpenAI engineers that were going to follow Altm…

> Do you think all those OpenAI engineers that were going to follow Altman were asked to do leetcode?

I don't know about OpenAI specifically, but I have heard of interviews at other top ML research positions were partly based on leetcode problems.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#475

Post by FabHK »

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…

And you think without leetcode questions the despicable biased interviewer from your example would not be able to hire someone from their Alma mater over someone else?

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#476

Post by ownagefool »

arethuza wrote: post #232
sjaak wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also used FizzBuzz at several companies, and the insane amount of people it filters out continues to boggle my mind.

I once froze in an interview when asked a simple technical question - I'd been giving a presentation for an hour on how to launch a new product and I was asked by the CEO how to do something technically trivial - my brain could not do it. So he probably thought I was some marketeer pretending to be technical - which isn't really true. I suspect quite a lot of people who are labelled as "can't code" are freezing like…

I suspect some do, and some will be a lot when you bunch them all together.

However, counter point, I've had people forced on me through much of my career who just can't code for the most part, and despite being pretty reasonable about it ( it's part of the nature of the work I do ), I'm very rarely surprised by competency.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#477

Post by resource_waste »

dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #372
resource_waste wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>All the talk about diversity, but no diversity of thought. Only LC chasers. I genuinely believe this decreases innovation massively. Nice belief, but good luck proving it. I imagine the people grinding LC are harder working/more innovative than people who watched TV instead.

Why are the two choices LC or TV? What about those who have a family, hobbies, etc?

The average American spends 3-4 hours per day on TV or Internet entertainment.

Sooo... its not much of a leap.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#478

Post by ownagefool »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #460
ownagefool wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I mean it was pretty obvious with their eyes darting then several lines of code appearing in the code editor.

Of course, this doesn't mean I've discovered 100% of the cheaters, just the obvious ones.

> Also, I'm curious: do you think having them discuss their solution in depth would have been a good countermeasure?

To some degree. But not everyone communicates as well as they code or vice versa, and then it comes to what you're trying to qualify.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#479

Post by resource_waste »

palata wrote: post #283
resource_waste wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They are not software engineers and it shows massively. Coming from Real Engineering and making 2x more programming, I lol at people who say there is any Engineering in software. We are programmers dealing with layers upon layers of abstraction. Knowing to optimize for time by using vectors is more of an art, than a science. I did do safety critical C code and Assembly which are probably my hole in the whole 'its no…

> Coming from Real Engineering One related problem I see is that Computer Science tends to be under-estimated by other engineering fields. A ton of software engineers did not study software. They learned to program as part of their engineering studies, and they believe that they learned both Computer Science and their engineering topic at the same time. I may be biased, but I see fewer computer scientists pretend to…

>One related problem I see is that Computer Science tends to be under-estimated by other engineering fields.

If Bachelor of Science computer science grads were that much more extraordinary, they wouldnt be working side by side with non-degreed programmers.

Chem Engineer here, I wrote random forest once. My coworker with a CS degree, all front end work.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#480

Post by Aunche »

angoragoats wrote: post #245
Aunche wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Forcing people to study for two months is blatantly discriminatory to age and family status, at a systemic level. How is this any less discriminatory than any other assessment based interview where you need to prepare? Non-assessment based interviews end up being vibes based which is much more discriminatory.

You’ve set up a false dichotomy here; for any given position, there is typically a way to conduct an assessment-based interview that doesn’t require too much preparation for qualified candidates. For example, at my current job, we hire web developers with Rails experience. Our technical interview process consists of either a pair programming session or an async/take-home task (candidate’s choice) which requires the c…

This may work out great if you happen to have worked on Rails for your last job. However, I doubt that everyone you interview is actually that familiar with Rails but rather is pursuing any sort of opportunity that they can get. In that case, they would actually more time to brush up multiple different tech stacks than simply on algorithms.
Post reply on HN