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

491–500 of 625 posts

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#491

Post by 6510 »

throwaway7ahgb wrote: post #377
hackinthebochs wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If that were the case then a normal, well accomplished software engineer shouldn't need to "grind" leetcode to pass an interview. No, what this shows is that the skill range for accomplished professional software devs is absolutely massive. What these companies want is to find the tail end of this very wide distribution. Leetcode interviews do a decent job at this. If you have been coding for a decade and can't do l…

FWIW I sort of agree with you. Background: I'm in a FAANG type company now, a YC company, 3000+ engineers. I'm a Staff SWE with 20+ years of experience (ECE degree) and make $600k+ per year. I've went through the promo cycle here (it sucks). I can't do any leet hards and can do leet mediums after studying. Some easy's take me a couple of tries. I usually do very poorly in interview coding exercises. ** throwaway , ma…

Curious, would you say FAANG offers the right challenges to stay in the 0.1% or 1% if one started out there? Are they actually in the right place to grow?

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#492

Post by breckenedge »

Jensson wrote: post #488
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.

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.

Leetcode deselected too many good experienced candidates, which is really who I prefer to hire. I have hired good leetcode juniors that did not improve and are no longer working in software.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#493

Post by concordDance »

kirth_gersen wrote: post #426
concordDance wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never practiced leetcode puzzles or memorised solutions to them. I don't understand why you jumped to this conclusion.

Probably because you said you "can solve the majority of leetcode hard problems in under an hour". That could easily give the impression that you have practiced them. If you haven't practiced them, then how do you know you can solve them?

Sample of 5-6 I tried for fun. Along with a handful of similar puzzles from other places.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#494

Post by jonkho »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #266
jonkho wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not true. In any discipline when confronted with a test there are two strategies: brute memorization of the question/answers, or developing the skills to tackle the problem dynamically. You cannot categorically claim that LC tests are largely memorization tests rather than raw problem-solving skills. That is just the approach you are capable of taking. Not being able to see up the mountain doesn’t imply there…

> You cannot categorically claim that LC tests are largely memorization tests rather than raw problem-solving skills. Sure I can. By the time you get to Leetcode hard, these aren't just "can you derive the answer". The questions by design take 45+ minutes and have some weird quirk in it that is nominally related to the core concept being tested. These aren't necessarily meant to be done on the fly during an interview…

Thank you. You just proved my point that “categorically LC is not largely memorization” by reinforcing that only in specific cases in some specific levels that you do need some specific domain knowledge.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#495

Post by NhanH »

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…

> 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.

I definitely do not have any misunderstanding here, and my description of hiring is the same as what you wrote, just in different phrasing: after a period of time, the company has to pick a candidate, presumably the best one by their interview signals.

I am disputing the standard claim of "it's better to have false negatives than false positives" by pointing out how that mindset does not work: since you have to choose someone anyway, the whole "avoiding false positives" might not be a thing at all

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#496

Post by mbravorus »

My frustration at this type of interviews is more philosophical. In broad strokes, for some reason the employers desire and require a significant amount of effort and training from potential employees so that those could (in theory) then solve complex problems for the company; but at the same time, employer's management _usually_ absolutely refuses to invest any noticeable resource in researching, designing and maintaining the processes they should be accountable for, including the recruitment.

Which leads to the current state of IT/high-tech recruitment where things are, in most cases, so mismatched between ends and means, it's not even funny. It might be very entertaining to look at how people hiring for senior+ infrastructure roles (SRE, DevOps, what have you) try to use "leetcode" style stages - unless you are a desperate job seeker. (and no, I don't think an SRE or cloud infra engineer shouldn't be able to code, I just don't think leetcode-style tests are at all relevant as tests for that)

And at the end of the day you end up with an engineering org where in the intake funnel they ask you to [competitively] solve variants of the knapsack problem, but once in, you end up solving it in the form of "how do I slice and dice a set of tickets within a completely irrelevant, misaligned and misunderstood "Agile" model so that can best pack SPs into a sprint and also do some actually useful work".

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#497

Post by Benjammer »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #280
Benjammer wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are we just going with a base assumption that interviewers can NEVER be trusted with anti-bias training and learning how evaluate people fairly? The examples mentioned in this comment section are all blatantly intentional biases that people are choosing to use. The amazing part is that all the “standard test eliminates bias” people seem to the most ignorant to where bias helps THEM. Forcing people to study for two…

>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…

1. I’ve worked at multiple companies that absolutely have expert interviewers who design the interview questions and then teach mid-level engineers how to proctor them correctly. It’s like one 30 minute meeting, it’s not that big a deal.

2. All tech companies I’ve worked at since around 2015 have completely standardized interview questions, sometimes also hosted in a GitHub repo where any employee is free to comment or even open a PR to request a change. Every candidate gets the same questions. This thing where “faang” interviewers just pull a random LC question out of their ass is complete insanity to me. An organized set of questions takes a senior engineer like a week to organize and commit to… And if your questions can be memorized and recited by rote memory and the candidate can do well on it without the proctor knowing, then your questions are BAD or your proctor is a moron.

3. I’ve never worked anywhere where I would describe the interview like this. Even the startup where I was the first engineer and there was no formal “test”, it was an hour long chat with the technical cofounder where he grilled me about coding skills and past experience/accomplishments. I won’t take a job if the interview isn’t asking me things that focus on my existing experience and skills, it’s a red flag about the company culture in general.

As for your “universal problem,” I disagree with fatalistic takes where you just throw your hands up and say “whatever shall we do” all the while YOU are the one benefitting from the system that cannot be changed. This is how simple-minded people think about the world.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#498

Post by CoastalCoder »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #433
johnnyanmac wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 i…

I forgot to mention another:

(4) Ghosting candidates seems common now. I'd never experienced it before now.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#500

Post by KaiserPro »

Aurornis wrote: post #453
KaiserPro wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> but coding challenges do catch a lot of bad hires.

leetcode doesn't catch bad hires, as someone whos done a lot of interviews, we could easily catch "bad" coders with a very simple whiteboard test or a "look at this code and tell me what you think"

but people being bad at code aren't the company killers, its the toxic people who are "good" at coding that do. They can be very good at these kind of tests, but are absolute shites to work with.

I think we actually agree more that I let on, and you are right that coding tests should only be a part of the interview process.

Post reply on HN