It is humiliating to have to do LeetCode grinding for • Hacker News Board

Re: It is humiliating to have to do LeetCode grinding for

#131

Post by hnbear » Fri, Nov 29, 2024, 8:47 PM UTC

Rather than pure leetcode in interviews, I like really simple take home activities. I know take-home’s aren’t well liked either. But, make it really simple and provide a fit repo to commit into. Provide the marking rubric.

Then you actually get to evaluate someone on how they’d work on your team.

- are their PRs nicely written - do they even know git properly - do they comment code - even for basic code is it structured - does it pass the linter?

Eg. Providing candidates a challenge and the actual pylint command you’ll score it with it’s really easy to see who even bothered to check it passes.

Rather than putting someone on the spot with leetcode see how they behave as a dev. On your real team you’ll have a story with acceptance criteria and a repo to PR into. Give them the same.

It can be a short tiny bit of code but you’ll learn so much about there behavior.

This is also much harder to just google the answer, because you don’t just care about the answer.

Design it so it’s just an hour or two, then offer the choice. Explain you need to evaluate their programming skills for a programming role and they have the choice of interviewer led in-person, or a take home. Both designed to be roughly 1-2 hours.

Re: It is humiliating to have to do LeetCode grinding for

#132

Post by uberman » Sat, Nov 30, 2024, 5:15 AM UTC

bdangubic wrote: post #127

bdangubic wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

really? how about if I wrote this? not personal or mean, yes? “Teaching a course where you are professor of record is certainly not grinding unless you dont know the topic at all.”

the absolute best professors on this planet are the grinders… if you are not, you are just coasting on something you think you know but you really don’t (probably re-using powerpoint presentations you created in 2012…)

Clearly I touched a nerve. Perhaps you view grinding as "doing your job". I happen to have a different definition.

Originating a class can be a slog and originating two to lecture next term would be a grind. If you are not professor of record and thus likely did not originate the class then your assignments and reading, hell the entire course is likely layed out for you. Teaching a section of a course you originated or that someone else originated is likely 80% of the teaching load. Familiarizing yourself with this material so you can effectively teach it is doing your job, not grinding.

I'm not sure why you feel the need to suggest I am a crappy teacher or that I lecture from notes more than a decade old. Knowing how accreditation works, how courses are originated, and how sections of thoses courses are taught at r1 institutions, I can only conclude you are ignorant as to how these things actually work.

As a real world example, there are many great online courses from places like MIT and Stanford. Hell you can sometimes even get these online lectures for free, the same material covered by those institutions as part of their degree programs.

How much grinding does it take for a lecturer to to proctor such a class, particularly given that they also likely get FAs to do labs and grading?

If you attended or work at a college where professors grind out new classes every term then that institution is going to have an accreditation and/or tenure issue as "special topics" dont make a degree program.

Re: It is humiliating to have to do LeetCode grinding for

#133

Post by sigbottle » Mon, Dec 02, 2024, 11:54 AM UTC

bdangubic wrote: post #127

bdangubic wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

really? how about if I wrote this? not personal or mean, yes? “Teaching a course where you are professor of record is certainly not grinding unless you dont know the topic at all.”

the absolute best professors on this planet are the grinders… if you are not, you are just coasting on something you think you know but you really don’t (probably re-using powerpoint presentations you created in 2012…)

For example, from the perspective of an algorithms junkie, there's literally 0 way an algorithms professor with algorithms research published would forget any of the basic algorithms they teach in an introduction to algorithms class.

Now what may happen is forgetting what it's like to be a naive, 18 year old freshman in college, and not somebody embroiled in academia for the past few decades.

But the audacity to suggest that it's even remotely within the norm for professors to not know their own material... wow.