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In Defense of LeetCode Interviews

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Re: In Defense of LeetCode Interviews

#51

Post by beaconify »

pajeets wrote: post #47

my retort to this article is this simple question: if you can look things up in an encyclopedia, why are you forced to recite it? if even low parameter LLM can solve most of these leetcode examples that cost nothing to run, why are we using it to discriminate applicants to measure "how badly do you want the $250k/year" It's almost like the people hiring are optimizing for masochists and there lies the devil, you want…

L1 cache is useful (or maybe good processor design is the better analogy...)

Being quick at the command line, using the right tools, can get around VS code quick, can solve the more trivial code problems quick (or quickly critique LLM output or a blog post). It adds up.

Re: In Defense of LeetCode Interviews

#52

Post by beaconify »

eadwu wrote: post #11

If you are the type of person who writes a big brain log(n) solution instead of n solution when there is no real reason (compute wise) and the log(n) is a pain in the ass to maintain. I hope I never see you in my team.

Yes! Just say give me o(log(n)) dollars! Ah now you care about n and k.

Re: In Defense of LeetCode Interviews

#53

Post by fragmede »

willio58 wrote: post #28
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 don’t know that people generally have a problem with testing their knowledge, I think most people that hate on Leetcode (including myself) just don’t like to code in front of strangers in a timed setting like that. I’ve never been good at tests in school. I probably averaged Cs on tests through college. Projects though? Aced them every time and sometimes got pulled aside and told I was highly exceeding the projects…

Yeah. Call it stage fright or performance anxiety or whatever you want. It doesn't matter if you want me to write code for you, being around other people makes me anxious and I can't think properly. I'm less anxious now compared to when I started my career, but coding interviews are the worst.

Re: In Defense of LeetCode Interviews

#54

Post by wakawaka28 »

novok wrote: post #40
willio58 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

A lot of the kinds of questions you'd want to skip have no trick. Also, presumably, if the question is to be swapped then they will not demand a full answer before doing the swap.

I think it's stupid to try to judge if someone has seen the question before. The only time it's wrong to have seen the question before is if someone tipped you off to that specific company's questions. I think that most people are not good enough at writing reasonable questions to attempt it. For that matter they are not good at picking reasonable questions for an interview out of a collection of problems either. People often choose problems that are excessively difficult, ambiguous, or even impossible to answer.

Re: In Defense of LeetCode Interviews

#55

Post by beaconify »

trh0awayman wrote: post #2

If 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 war…

Leetcode is often one or two rounds. You also get tested for culture and design interviews. This is not ideal but hard to see how FAANGs are gonna do it. I guess FAANGs need operationalists though except for their research arms. Dynamodb works well. Your job is to make it work 0.01% better to save a few mill.

Re: In Defense of LeetCode Interviews

#57

Post by GuB-42 »

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…

The thing is, all these arguments can apply to any test you do during an interview. It is always under pressure, and it will always be incomplete. You will never know for sure before you actually hire the candidate.

If the interview for a coding job doesn't involve actual coding, how do you know that the candidate can code? What you may get are people who are just really good at selling themselves. Maybe a good fit for the sales department, but not so much for the technical position you are hiring for.

LeetCode is not perfect, but no test is.

As for the "memorization" aspect. You can certainly memorize solutions. But you can't just memorize every character of every solution and regurgitate it perfectly. You will need to make some generalizations, just to fit everything into your brain, and as you type it back, you will probably misremember something, and have to fix the bug or bridge the gap. Those are useful, real life coding skills.

Re: In Defense of LeetCode Interviews

#58

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: In Defense of LeetCode Interviews

#60

Post by coolThingsFirst »

They are good and I've had nothing but positive experiences through them.

In all the tech phone interviews that I've done in my life I have NEVER failed a LC/algorithm related interview. My secret is to try to engage genuinely with the problem. And even when I haven't been able to solve a problem I still would get passed to next round bcs I'd be on the right track.

I still don't know what ppl are complaining about. LC have a correct solution and a good interviewer will pass you if you are on a good track. They are also relatively easy to prepare for. Now compare to actual BS which is the requirement to have done work in a particular track that the company is hiring for.

Now that's total BS, I can't get 5 years in python in like 2 weeks before interview no matter how motivated I may be for the job.

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