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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

#541

Post by bdangubic »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #535
fragmede wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not op, but FWIW, I know people who make high six figures (explicitly, $750k>) at companies that aren't household names or FAANG(ish) companies (or AI companies for that matter), though I also know my share of people that are at such companies that most people, or maybe just people here have heard of, that also make > $750k. Some of them aren't even software engineers! Most (all?) of them aren't paid that much on the…

I 100% believe it's possible, but that's even more of a lottery than FAANG is which would negate his point :). If you can get your foot in the door it's hard to beat FAANG comp on a risk-adjusted basis and they do actually employ quite a lot of SWEs, which I think is why it's such a focal point for tech jobs even though you can get similar comp in other situations.

I respectfully disagree… It is just what most people think but it simply not true speaking from personal experience of 25 years in the industry.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#542

Post by johnnyanmac »

jonkho wrote: post #539
johnnyanmac wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that LC hards were not intended nor designed to be perfromed in an interview setting, and essentially most people will only do the in that typical interview timeline if they've lucky enough to have seen it before or lucky enough to understand the specific domain knowledge. So I'm not sure we're interpreting the same conclusion here unless you think trick questions are a mark of a "good engineer".

My point is that a claim cannot be made that categorically LC tests are generally a test on memorization. It appears your point does not disprove that. You mention exceptions, that in fact proves the general rule is true (I.e your claim isn’t of the form: most leet code questions of almost any level cannot answered without spending 45 mins and requiring specialized domain knowledge as a prerequisite). You cannot argu…

You can disagree, but I and many others can very much make a claim. I argue it can even be a well supported claim. Your personal disagreement isn't a refutal of any and all claims.

>You cannot argue against general rule by pointing out specialized exceptions.

Lertcode hards in interviews have been getting more common for a decade now. At what point do we stop pretending that more cats aren't losing their 4th leg and announce an epidemic?

It shouldn't be common, but it's becoming more common. I haven't seen any claims in any conversion even disagree with the notion, let alone provide hard evidence.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#543

Post by CoastalCoder »

ryandrake wrote: post #506
CoastalCoder wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> (2) Some interview processes are way more rigorous. For a DevTech role within nVidia, I had 12 interviews + 2 take-home problems. (BTW, the take home problems were incredibly fun. Well done nVidia!) That's ridiculous, tho. Did they really not have enough information on the 11th interview to know whether or not they wanted to hire you?

That was my take as well :)

FWIW, the take-home problems were the most fun I've had in front of a computer for a long time.

That made up a bit for the Marathon of interviews.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#544

Post by bdangubic »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #535
fragmede wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not op, but FWIW, I know people who make high six figures (explicitly, $750k>) at companies that aren't household names or FAANG(ish) companies (or AI companies for that matter), though I also know my share of people that are at such companies that most people, or maybe just people here have heard of, that also make > $750k. Some of them aren't even software engineers! Most (all?) of them aren't paid that much on the…

I 100% believe it's possible, but that's even more of a lottery than FAANG is which would negate his point :). If you can get your foot in the door it's hard to beat FAANG comp on a risk-adjusted basis and they do actually employ quite a lot of SWEs, which I think is why it's such a focal point for tech jobs even though you can get similar comp in other situations.

If you start to view yourself as a business vs. an easily-replaceable-one-of-thousands individual your career takes an entirely different shape.

the entire system from the ground-up is setup to convince you that you are an individual and you need to go find a job and work like everyone else (hopefully with hefty student loan and other debts) and in our industry be treated like cattle and be subjected to some crazy interview process where you have to hack on some sh*t no one cares about.

if you start thinking about yourself as a business your goals become more like “how do I make myself profitable, how do I get to the point where another business cannot effectively operate without my services.”

is this a lottery? maybe… this is easier said than done but I would rather spend my career in this chase than be an employee somewhere where 99% of my peers don’t know my name

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#545

Post by wegfawefgawefg »

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…

Casual gamedev here. Ive written like 100 quadtrees from scratch so its a goto algorithm Ive got down by memory. I used to think this datastructure was very basic and common because young gamedevs often share it online with eachother. Highschoolers etc.

One time in a technical interview I realized a quadtree would solve the problem they were asking. I also happened to be reading SICP and practical common lisp on the plane on the way over to the interview. (specifically the sql sdl macro chapter) Unfortunately this gave me an idea. I narrated, sketched out and pseudocoded a plist based quadtree on the whiteboard and felt pretty good about myself.

I turned around to see my interviewers were not impressed. Actually they thought I was an idiot. They didnt know what a quadtree was, and they were quite upset I used "tuples".

I assured them its very efficient, and that the compiler would take care of "the tuples".

They failed me. Moral of the story don't use common lisp in a javascript interview.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#546

Post by dgfitz »

DonHopkins wrote: post #331
kidintech wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no. I wanted to say Eastern, as I have examples from both Asia and East Europe. I wished to not be more specific so as to not derail the discussion into "user kidintech implied that nation X has a tendency to cheat".

So New York, Boston, Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, New Jersey, Main, Connecticut, Rhode Island, etc? Or by "cheating" are you specifically referring to the lying cheating treasonous fraud from New York who was just found guilty of 34 felonies to cover up cheating on his wife with a porn star to inflence the election?

Washington is a state on the west coast. Washington D.C. straddles Maryland and Virginia. Baltimore is a city in Maryland.

Why are you double-dipping on examples? If people don’t know their geography it’s meaningless, and if they do (like me) it makes you seem disingenuous.

Oh but then you bring up politics so it makes sense. Fuck this bullshit world, it’s so exhausting.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#547

Post by 6510 »

palata wrote: post #518
6510 wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is perfectly fine to ask anything from the interviewer. How long have they worked there? Did they have other jobs? Why did they leave? Is there anything specific that is great about this place? Why are you looking for employees? Did someone quit? Do you have a lot of meetings? Do you enjoy coding? Do you have anything interesting on github? Not specifically that but give it your own twist. If they are confused rem…

Except that the interviewer has the power to fail you if you put them in a bad position. It is fundamentally an asymmetrical situation where the interviewer is in a dominant position.

I would argue that is only true in an employer employee relationship.

I fondly remember laughing my ass off with the owner of a company about what a shit job he was offering. A shit job with shit pay, no wonder you are looking for employees. It took me 5 minutes to figure out there was no real job worth considering. We spend the better part of an hour just chatting after that. [In my opinion] he was drowning in work because he was to cheap, it makes the company unreliable.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#548

Post by fragmede »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #324
jkukul wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A leet-code test would be much more standardized if candidates could solve it at home. Just send me a link to the quiz and let me solve it within a specified time frame. I've done tests like this for some companies. It felt a lot fairer and more closely resembling the actual work environment than live leet-code interviews, with biased interviewer(s) and a stress factor that's not a part of the actual job.

As a hiring manager I HATE leet-code tests, and they do nothing to differentiate candidates, but a take home in the era where people run chatGPT beside the interview window, or have someone else do the interview for them? Not a chance. You are 100% correct that it is way more representative, but the prevalence of cheating is ridiculous.

The better/new interview question, thus, is "here is code that chatGPT generated for $PROBLEM", what's wrong with it.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#549

Post by hcrean »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #304
hcrean wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I failed FizzBuzz the first time someone gave it to me in an interview... The specific failure was that I first attempted to solve by using repeated subtraction. The guy kept asking me to "solve it a different way", or saying "there is a better way to solve this". I tried using arithmetic tables, I tried using results about base10 remainders and I even tried using one of the corollaries to Fermat's little theorem to…

Honestly sounds like a bad interviewer. repeated subtraction is a good first step and I would try to push more if that was the first implementation. But If you could derive a base 10 remainder you know conceptually what problem the mod operator is trying to solve. a % b = a - (b * a/b) / assuming a sane language with integer division, else cast a/b to int / Figuring the above operation (or getting close) is when you…

I am highly reluctant to use type casting as a mathematical function!! I was burnt by early languages struggling with this problem... Even modern languages still have issues with this! Try running this in Python3.11

``` float(9007199254740993) == int(9007199254740992) ```

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#550

Post by fragmede »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #412
skeeter2020 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a hiring manager I HATE leet-code tests, and they do nothing to differentiate candidates, but a take home in the era where people run chatGPT beside the interview window, or have someone else do the interview for them? Not a chance. You are 100% correct that it is way more representative, but the prevalence of cheating is ridiculous.

This does seem like a vexing problem, especially when interviews are conducted remotely. I wonder if either of the following could be cost-effective: (a) Fly the candidate to a company office, where their compute usage could be casually monitored by an employee. (b) Use high-quality proctoring services that are nearby to the candidate. E.g., give them 1-2 days in a coworking space, and hire a proctor to verify that t…

Before Covid, on-sites were, well, on site, and flying the candidate in for a day was just accepted practice.
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