In Defense of LeetCode Interviews
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In Defense of LeetCode Interviews
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Re: In Defense of LeetCode Interviews
#2If you hire using LeetCode, you will surround yourself with people who enjoy blogging about LeetCode in their free time.
LeetCode was never about LeetCode, it was always a stand in for culture.
It's now a signal for baseline compliance. That's generally good for companies that require mostly operationalists.
The problem is that anyone can learn to leetcode. If you're interested in doing something new and not just warehousing CS lawyers, you're gonna have to ask better questions than that.
Re: In Defense of LeetCode Interviews
#3I feel like the author missed the most critical point: Leetcode style interviews are great at weeding out terrible coders (95% of applicants) early on in the hiring process, but don't carry an as strong signal for separating excellent candidates from the good ones.
Asking standard array/string manipulation/sorting etc questions in a 30min phone screen is very valuable to save your engineers 5hrs on a poor candidate. Conversely, throwing an NP hard leetcode hard at a senior dev with 20 years of experience and excellent culture fit with your organization in the 9th interview is basically meaningless.
Re: In Defense of LeetCode Interviews
#4I feel like the author missed the most critical point: Leetcode style interviews are great at weeding out terrible coders (95% of applicants) early on in the hiring process, but don't carry an as strong signal for separating excellent candidates from the good ones. Asking standard array/string manipulation/sorting etc questions in a 30min phone screen is very valuable to save your engineers 5hrs on a poor candidate.…
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Re: In Defense of LeetCode Interviews
#5I feel like the author missed the most critical point: Leetcode style interviews are great at weeding out terrible coders (95% of applicants) early on in the hiring process, but don't carry an as strong signal for separating excellent candidates from the good ones. Asking standard array/string manipulation/sorting etc questions in a 30min phone screen is very valuable to save your engineers 5hrs on a poor candidate.…
Conversely, throwing an NP hard leetcode hard at a senior dev with 20 years of experience and excellent culture fit with your organization in the 9th interview is basically meaningless.
Worse than meaningless, it's a great way to toss away a diamond in the rough.
Leetcode problems skew towards competitive programming and grinders. They do absolutely nothing to show real-world programming skills which involve: 1) working within a large, existing codebase, 2) strong code documentation and commit message habits, 3) understanding of coding styles within the company culture so that you don't write in an unintelligible, bespoke style, and 4) communication skills and the ability to work within a team so that the candidate is not fighting strong headwinds.
Re: In Defense of LeetCode Interviews
#6Leetcode is just a proxy for an IQ test. That's it. If you can study up and do well on leetcode, then you're smart. People getting hung up on how realistic the questions are, or whether you ever need to implement X data structure are confused.
Fact is that no job can give a reasonable test for how it is to work there short of working there. There's team dynamics, developer / project fit, etc etc. All you can ever do is measure some proxies. Leetcode is just a much better proxy than the old "how many ping-pong balls fit in a school bus" questions.
Re: In Defense of LeetCode Interviews
#7I did a lot of leetcode stuff this year. Dozens of interviews, no takers.
What got me a job was that I was a solo founder running a business and learning how to make the most of limited resources. Aka I was someone that gets things done and spends the least amount possible to get there. Use the resources you have and show you can create value.
Again, it all comes down to show don't tell.
Leetcode is valuable as a way to practice and maybe reaffirm skills. It's not useful for hiring in a direct way.
Re: In Defense of LeetCode Interviews
#8Aren't there supposed AI tools out there for cheating on these standardized tests?
Re: In Defense of LeetCode Interviews
#9I have always seen LeetCode problems as effectively hazing rituals in a job interview setting. A high pressure interview situation simply won’t bring out peak problem-solving capabilities in many people. At best you get some superficial insight into someone’s problem solving methodology, but at worst you filter out otherwise excellent fits for not being able to solve an ultimately inconsequential problem under pressure.
LeetCode questions as interview questions are mostly theater. Most people who do well on these aren’t actually “solving them” on the fly from scratch. They just happen to have seen the exact same problem before and retake the steps they’ve memorized to get to the answer. Testing whether or not someone can regurgitate the solution they have memorized to a math problem doesn’t tell you much about how they will perform in a truly novel non-contrived constraint problem scenario, which is generally what most dev work entails.
Perhaps if you are working at Bespoke Algorithms ‘R Us, benchmarking this would have more value to your org, but for most dev roles at most companies it is hard to see it as more than a compliance exercise, or maybe even as a tool to weed out those with families that can’t devote the hours/day to LC memorization.
Re: In Defense of LeetCode Interviews
#10I'm so sick of LeetCode nonsense, I'm inspired to make a denylist of every company and blog and username that promotes it.