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

481–490 of 625 posts

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#481

Post by ownagefool »

XorNot wrote: post #180
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.

Do you tell them what the "mod" operator is before giving it? The failure rate of FizzBuzz has always struck me as depending on the idea that you can do a lot of programming and just never need that operator.

I stopped using fizz buzz a long time ago. 90% of candidates can't define a 2d array in their chosen language without first filtering the candidates, where you get to about 50%.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#482

Post by ownagefool »

DonHopkins wrote: post #355
sjaak wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No but I permit internet access as long as they don't search for the solution (I trust them not to do that, and don't monitor what they do)

You're too trusting.

Whilst I agree, his point still stands that either they do it fast or never.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#483

Post by red-iron-pine »

Aurornis wrote: post #416
gumby wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At all the companies I’ve run we’ve used a simple whiteboard example for this reason. Don’t worry about typos; how does the person think. “Trick” questions are dumb, but you want to get an idea of if the candidate knows their stuff (and let the candidate know what we’re like — interviewing is a sales process in both directions). If someone asks a question like “is it ok to modify the argument” (or says “I’ll assume I…

> We had one candidate who insisted that parsing a string and returning an integer was an unreasonable question because there was already a library function for it. “But what if you have an embedded system and no library?” (an actual situation for us, for part of our system). He was adamant — honestly that was a failure of the phone screen: had it been caught it would have saved us, and him, from wasting time. Trying…

there is a lot of stupid bullshit in most orgs, and things only get fixed by often irritable, unreasonable people. "shut up and do it" was only an acceptable answer when I was in the military.

if the interviewee pushes back and find they don't like the answer, then it's a good signal to both parties.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#484

Post by bradlys »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #369
begueradj wrote: post #257

Such 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.

I know what you're saying but I don't think there is any kind of nefarious backroom discussion that goes on to this purpose. I think more likely though are the accidental favoritism in the industry where engineers submit resumes of other engineers they know who are looking for a job who, surprise, are also white males. I don't believe it is either racist or sexist however. It's just "who people know". Nonetheless, yo…

Where are you working that it’s white males?

80% of my colleagues are Chinese and Indian. This is usually the case at most of my jobs that aren’t early stage startups.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#485

Post by angoragoats »

Aunche wrote: post #480
angoragoats wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In that case, the interview question is working as intended. For most of our roles, we want several years of Rails experience, and we are clear about that fact in the job listing. If someone applies without Rails experience, they either didn't read the job listing, or are desperate to find any job. While I empathize with folks in the latter situation, our positions really do require the experience, and the job market isn't so bad right now that a smart candidate should be going a long time without finding something.

If you happen to have Rails experience but it was several jobs ago, the task we give you is basic enough that you should be able to Google what you need during the task to refresh your memory fairly quickly. In fact, I did this when I applied, having not worked with Rails in a number of years.

Edit: My main point is, even if you technically do have to "study" (really, just Google a few basic Rails concepts) if you're rusty, everything you do is preparing you for the actual job. Studying how to implement a hashmap, or computing the longest palindrome from a string of characters, or whatever other harebrained problem FAANG etc want to ask, is 99% of the time not really helping you prepare for those jobs.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#486

Post by mihaitodor »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #470
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.

I can't say this will work for everyone given the scarcity of jobs. I can afford to miss out on certain opportunities and I'm perfectly happy to invest longer stretches of time in networking and doing whatever homeworks if the assignment makes sense and it's something I am interested in. Let me put it this way: I'd very much rather change professions than go through another Leetcode-style interview again. So far it hasn't come to that, thankfully. There are enough opportunities out there once you spend some time building a portfolio and people in the open source space get to know you.

PS: What this approach gives me is piece of mind since I know I won't get a surprise-Leetcode if I go through an interview. It has happened to me in the past, where the recruiter wasn't really aware what the process is and I haven't told them up front what I'm not OK with. Once I'm there in front of people, it's very awkward and frustrating for me to have to get up and walk out and I'd very much rather avoid that situation. Also, it's a waste of my time.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#487

Post by palata »

resource_waste wrote: post #479
palata wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

My mistake. If you wrote a random forest once, it certainly means that you should be the CTO of Google. And that chem engineers are all smarter than computer scientists.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#488

Post by Jensson »

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.

Were those juniors with no experience developing features? Leetcode doesn't test if they have experience, you need to check both if you want someone that can do everything.

Someone who does well on leetcode is usually easy to teach so they will become good/great in a year or two, but if you don't have that time then go for leetcode+experience just like everyone else is.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#489

Post by tnel77 »

lumb63 wrote: post #294
gumby wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At all the companies I’ve run we’ve used a simple whiteboard example for this reason. Don’t worry about typos; how does the person think. “Trick” questions are dumb, but you want to get an idea of if the candidate knows their stuff (and let the candidate know what we’re like — interviewing is a sales process in both directions). If someone asks a question like “is it ok to modify the argument” (or says “I’ll assume I…

I have come to like this approach reasonably well. My current company uses a similarly simple problem to evaluate candidates. For me, it was a breeze, and I thought we’d be hiring slouches left and right. Once I started administering the interview, I realized that the majority of candidates absolutely bomb this simple question for one reason or another. It seems that “able to code a simple problem well” is a far less…

I have a friend who has interviewed about 30-40 software engineering candidates for his company (small, publicly traded company from the midwest). He said that FizzBuzz alone is enough to filter out 25% of applicants. The next slight more challenging question will axe another 30-40% of candidates. I think Leetcode hards exist to stroke the egos of select software engineers.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#490

Post by breckenedge »

FabHK wrote: post #467
breckenedge wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Giving people real world problems and pairing with them on finding a solution.
Post reply on HN