In Defense of LeetCode Interviews • Hacker News Board

Re: In Defense of LeetCode Interviews

#31

Post by choppaface » Sat, Oct 12, 2024, 4:12 AM UTC

MarkMarine wrote: post #23

I have a couple great companies on my resume because I ground these leetcode questions, but now that I’ve been working and in industry for 14 years… I don’t have the time to do the grind unless I’m explicitly looking for a job. The DS&A skills are still there, I use them and I’m glad I have them, but when someone reaches out to me to join their startup out of the blue and then hits me with the leetcode hard question…

Leetcode can work well for junior / new grad candidates if you help & hint them a bit. For example they probably forgot breadth-first search, but if you give a couple hints about queues and they show tremendous swiftness, then that can be a good sign they’ll learn very quickly on the job. Does not prevent false negatives but reduces the FN rate and gives them what they really want (learning experience).

Re: In Defense of LeetCode Interviews

#32

Post by 000ooo000 » Sat, Oct 12, 2024, 4:13 AM UTC

>However, I usually trust my intuition quite a lot, and before giving it up I decided to find some strong arguments in favor of Leetcode (LC) interviews, and here they are.

Sounds like confirmation bias to me..

Re: In Defense of LeetCode Interviews

#33

Post by ifiht » Sat, Oct 12, 2024, 4:16 AM UTC

ifiht wrote: post #30

Welcome to your leetcode interview in the age of ai: https://leetcodewizard.io/

Also I love these comments, thank you all for vindicating my disdain for this practice.

Re: In Defense of LeetCode Interviews

#34

Post by gedy » Sat, Oct 12, 2024, 4:25 AM UTC

habitue wrote: post #6

Leetcode 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…

I wish they'd just give IQ tests then.. I do just fine in those (~140) but not a leet coder at all.

Re: In Defense of LeetCode Interviews

#35

Post by bearjaws » Sat, Oct 12, 2024, 4:28 AM UTC

IMO the worst problem with leetcode challenges are the fact they are 100% in the training set of LLMs.

They solve them instantly, and making matters worse they are 100% valueless to a company.

What universe do we live in that hiring managers want staff that are 100% as skilled as an LLM but probably not as strong in areas that actually matter?

The reality everyone with a brain is going to cheat on these, they are typically pretty early in the interview process and it will hopefully get replaced with a real world test.

At my last job we just used example problems that we had seen in the past, usually REST API focused with just enough nuance to make engineers think through it and potentially refactor their code. Then you can ask them specifics of their thought process and get insight to their experience.

Re: In Defense of LeetCode Interviews

#36

Post by the_gorilla » Sat, Oct 12, 2024, 4:29 AM UTC

OnionBlender wrote: post #21

waythenewsgoes wrote: post #9

I 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 pressu…

I was looking at the Meta interview guide and it says: > Let us know if you’ve seen the problem previously and also: > In your tech screen, you’ll be asked to solve two problems in roughly 35 minutes. Practice coding solutions to medium and hard problems in less than 15 minutes each to help you be ready for the constraints during the interview. The only way I could solve two problems in 35 minutes is if I've seen the…

This was basically my experience in college too. There was no time to understand something, and tests didn't test your understanding. If you tried to solve a proof for the first time you'd run out of time and fail. You just had to grind homework and book questions until you could shit them out in 5 minutes each.

Re: In Defense of LeetCode Interviews

#37

Post by danjl » Sat, Oct 12, 2024, 4:34 AM UTC

A good senior developer should be able to go out to lunch and know if the candidate has the skills and the right cultural match by the end. There's no need for coding tests or whiteboarding problems. I've seen some of the best developers I've worked with in 40 years of coding get turned away by Google and Apple because of their terrible interview processes. The only thing better than going out to lunch is working with the person for a couple of weeks. Ideally this happens on a paid contract basis. Of course our culture makes it more challenging to switch jobs if you want to work together first, but really no other interview process has ever provided good data.

Re: In Defense of LeetCode Interviews

#38

Post by smarklefunf » Sat, Oct 12, 2024, 4:34 AM UTC

habitue wrote: post #6

Leetcode 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…

yeah but what if you are smart but don't want to spend time on pointless bullshit?

Re: In Defense of LeetCode Interviews

#39

Post by dothack » Sat, Oct 12, 2024, 4:35 AM UTC

neilv wrote: post #10

I'm so sick of LeetCode nonsense, I'm inspired to make a denylist of every company and blog and username that promotes it.

Here is an allowlist: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

Re: In Defense of LeetCode Interviews

#40

Post by novok » Sat, Oct 12, 2024, 4:37 AM UTC

willio58 wrote: post #25

OnionBlender wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was looking at the Meta interview guide and it says: > Let us know if you’ve seen the problem previously and also: > In your tech screen, you’ll be asked to solve two problems in roughly 35 minutes. Practice coding solutions to medium and hard problems in less than 15 minutes each to help you be ready for the constraints during the interview. The only way I could solve two problems in 35 minutes is if I've seen the…

> Let us know if you’ve seen the problem previously Or just say “I’ve seen this one before” until they get to one you actually have seen before and ace it. Leetcode is a joke. I’ve hired a dozen or so high quality candidates using a short 2-3 hour take-home. It shows us more than leetcode ever could. And sometimes people take it places I could have never imagined, these are people we move quickly on and they are the…

people would usually ask for what the 'trick' is and you won't be able to give the correct answer if you lie like that