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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

#231

Post by triyambakam »

concordDance wrote: post #121
logicchains wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard leetcode questions hire grinders, not thinkers. Many of those questions were thesis/publication-worthy decades ago when first solved; it's unlikely for even a very intelligent person to produce a similar result in just tens of minutes. So if someone solves it, it's much more likely to be because they saw it or a similar question while grinding practice questions than that they genuinely derived the optimal solut…

I disagree with this. I can solve the majority of leetcode hard problems in under an hour despite not having seen them before and I'm far from the smartest person I've met.

Under an hour is... not enough time for an interview. Needs to be under 20-30 minutes given that most interviews are 60 minutes and the other 20-50% is taken up by other conversation.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#232

Post by arethuza »

sjaak wrote: post #124
ownagefool wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the problem is the format, i.e. a 30-50 minute interview on simple coding with DS&A problems, but the escalation. The reality is, fizz buzz got us 75% of the way there. It turns out when pressed, a lot of people can't write code. Yes, there's false positives, but there's also people brute focing their way through via copy & paste. This doesn't manifest as a person who can't do any task, just as a person…

I've also used FizzBuzz at several companies, and the insane amount of people it filters out continues to boggle my mind.

I once froze in an interview when asked a simple technical question - I'd been giving a presentation for an hour on how to launch a new product and I was asked by the CEO how to do something technically trivial - my brain could not do it. So he probably thought I was some marketeer pretending to be technical - which isn't really true.

I suspect quite a lot of people who are labelled as "can't code" are freezing like I did.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#233

Post by dfadsadsf »

kidintech wrote: post #83
dvt wrote: post #16

> I don’t really have a solution to this problem, I just know it’s a problem. The solution is simple: refuse to do those interviews. I have, and I wish more engineers would. It's one of my screening questions: do you do whiteboard style quiz/brainteaser interviews? If the answer is affirmative, I politely (and sometimes impolitely) decline. I've written a book, edited another, contributed to plenty of open source, in…

I am genuinely curious: I am starting a company, and I need smart people; I do not care how good they are at programming language X, or technology T - all the skills my employees will need can be learned on the job. I want to optimize the time it takes for an arbitrary hire to become independent, to have learned the basics, and to make meaningful contributions. They would write code at most 20% of the time, and the j…

> all the skills my employees will need can be learned on the job. > optimize the time it takes for an arbitrary hire to become independent

So you are looking for somebody in top 5% cognitive ability and top 5% independence which is what pretty much every other employer wants.

My advice is if you can pay competitive FAANG salaries (or compensate lower salaries by prestige/saving humanity/bringing people to Mars), just do what everyone else is doing - Leetcode, behavior interview and architecture interview. Innovate on something else, standard interview process will give you smart motivated folks.

If you can’t pay those salaries, you need to be creative and decide what compromises you are ready to make and tailor interview process to them. No one size fits all process here. You are essentially looking for people who failed in standard process while still posses qualities you need. Expect to spend more time on hiring and have more bad hires.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#234

Post by decremental »

koolba wrote: post #168
mvdtnz wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If your complaint is that a normal person wouldn’t have the time to study these things in detail, why would a company want to hire someone who has external obligations? External obligations like full time employment and a family?

Yes exactly. All things being equal, I’d rather higher someone who’s going to dedicate his entire life to the soul crushing work he will be assigned.

[dead]

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#235

Post by jboggan »

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…

3) It's also a form of hazing to make the engineers conducting the interview feel better about their current station.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#236

Post by waciki »

resource_waste wrote: post #97
FL33TW00D wrote: post #36

Another interesting point about Leetcode-style interviews I've not seen raised: it's a form of intellectual hazing. It's been proven many times that the severity of an initiation ceremony significantly boosts the commitment of those admitted to the group.

The problem is that losers cannot pass the test, but winners can. What is a better capitalistic company hiring programmers: >Lots of smart similar people who believe in correct answers >Lots of random skilled people If you said the latter, you are idealistic and your opinion genuinely doesnt matter. Nature will replace you with someone smarter and realistic.

> The problem is that losers cannot pass the test, but winners can.

Citation needed

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#237

Post by gumby »

SilverBirch wrote: post #29

I understand the frustration, but at the end of the day I think they do serve a purpose. They're not great at that purpose, but they're good enough and they generally produce false negatives (smart people fail) rather than false positives (you hire an idiot). And this makes sense, because a false negative is low cost (maybe you spend 50% longer interviewing candidates) but a false positive is high cost (you hire an i…

At all the companies I’ve run we’ve used a simple whiteboard example for this reason. Don’t worry about typos; how does the person think.

“Trick” questions are dumb, but you want to get an idea of if the candidate knows their stuff (and let the candidate know what we’re like — interviewing is a sales process in both directions). If someone asks a question like “is it ok to modify the argument” (or says “I’ll assume I can’t modify the argument”) that’s great (or says “I can’t remember if strlen includes the 0 byte so I’ll add 1 — normally I’d look it up”) - again, no trick questions.

When I say “simple” it’s something like atoi or “shuffle a deck of cards”: basic, but not 100% trivial like fizzbuzz.

On of our best hires was a guy who made a fundamental mistake — when we asked him if it world work as intended he said “I’m a fucking idiot” and fixed it. You’re not supposed to talk like that in an interview I supposed but we read it as a strong positive signal.

We had one candidate who insisted that parsing a string and returning an integer was an unreasonable question because there was already a library function for it. “But what if you have an embedded system and no library?” (an actual situation for us, for part of our system). He was adamant — honestly that was a failure of the phone screen: had it been caught it would have saved us, and him, from wasting time.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#238

Post by m0llusk »

Managed to solve this problem by going into business for myself. Have applied to some potentially interesting positions, but got batted away as not good enough at coding quiz questions. If I ever feel the need to be treated disrespectfully by people with two or three decades less experience then maybe I'll put my resume out there again. Probably not, though. Kind of interesting that I know many like me who have decades of proven experience but little interest in modern interview games and end up going different ways. Lots of value being left on the table, but there it is.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#239

Post by upmind »

Leetcode style interviews are not great, but I much prefer them to take homes. However, some FAANG+ companies have a nice system (for internship), where they give a very small codebase (~100ish lines) to work on with some errors / possible improvements and you go through those in the interview.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#240

Post by simplefish »

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…

I interviewed at a company known for consistently asking one of the same four questions in a specific interview round. These questions were widely shared on forums like Blind, Leetcode, and Glassdoor. The recruiters also provided strong guidance on the type of problems to expect.

I prepared thoroughly for all four main questions and any other plausible ones I could think of. I practiced writing solutions to ensure I was fast enough for the interview. Additionally, I pre-prepared ideal answers for each question in case I got stuck.

When the interview came, I got a total curveball: a question that was significantly harder than the usual ones. It didn't fit the round's theme (it was a DSA question, but I'd already aced the DSA round), was obscure enough not to be on LeetCode, and required writing a solver for a hard variant of a known algorithm. I panicked, copied the prompt into ChatGPT (despite being instructed not to use it), transcribed the result, and pretended I had recently studied the relevant algorithm.

I passed the round, nailed the other interviews, got the offer, and accepted. Later, I found out that interviewers are instructed to pick one of four specific questions for that round, and the one I got wasn't in the list.

I'm left wondering if the interviewer was trying to sink me or was just bored with the usual questions. The whole experience raised several questions for me:

Is it cheating if I already had pre-prepared answers for the questions they were supposed to ask? What's the difference between using pre-prepared answers and using Google or ChatGPT during the interview?

If the interview had gone according to plan, what was I actually demonstrating? My ability to use Google?

When the interviewer asked an impossibly difficult question, I would have failed if I answered it legit, even though I'm a good engineer. Failing such an unfair interview round doesn't serve the company's interests.

What is this interview process meant to demonstrate? My true value as an engineer lies in my ability to communicate clearly, think outside the box, identify and address technical tradeoffs, mentor juniors, and propose technical solutions that meet requirements while minimizing risks. Yet, I'm expected to solve a hard variant of the Traveling Salesman Problem in 45 minutes or I don't get the job? Why?

The whole process seems broken, but I'm not sure how to fix it.

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