Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

fev.al

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 675 posts

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#351

Post by scanny »

Been an interviewer and interviewee recently, so being on both sides of the track has given me some perspective.

This is the current process that I think is fair and holistic:

1. meeting with the candidate, our manager, and some devs talking about their past exp., our company, our team, and their wants

2. Take home coding task based on our day to day work: This is linear with direct instructions for inputs and outputs; there is an optional part at the end for testing more tricky concepts. They are instructed to write clean and clear, no stress if they don’t finish, take their time with a week to do it (it’s a few hours work).

3. Interview with them walking through their code on their machine and describing their thought process, field questions from them if any are left.

Then we decide by a team discussion afterwards.

Gives them their space to think, reduced pressure for candidates who are socially pressured.

Thoughts?

I personally detest leet code as a recruiting tool.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#352

Post by spamizbad »

brhsagain wrote: post #148

All of these supposed "flaws" of leetcode are by design. Big companies want people who are smart enough to do the work, but obedient enough to put up with all the bullshit that comes with working at a big company. What person better matches that than someone who's able and willing to study for and pass a tech version of the SAT? Every anti-leetcode article I read is some version of "leetcode is bad because it measure…

Some of startups are founded by people with limited technical experience who, as a crutch, just cargo-cult technology trends from bigco's. IME you're better off going full "cowboy" than trying to crib bigco practices.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#353

Post by gjm11 »

bodge5000 wrote: post #338
hiq wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone who builds a truly novel technology solution involving hundreds of hours of effort This person should already have enough of a reputation to get a job at many companies, if their work is public enough. What do you suggest for the 99%+ other candidates?

Wasn't there famously the story of the guy who wrote a package manager (brew?) that become massively popular and was widely used at google, and yet google rejected him for a job because he couldn't invert a binary tree or something? Don't know all the details so I could be missing something crucial, but if not it'd seem that reputation isn't enough

Yup. Max Howell, creator of Homebrew. A bit more information here https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin... (link to Quora, uggh, but that's where he wrote it). HN discussion of that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15981338. Howell's earlier tweet after getting turned down by Google: https://nitter.net/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en. "Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off."

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#354

Post by jimbob45 »

throwaddzuzxd wrote: post #96

In my team we do technical interviews in three steps: - an algorithmic challenge. It's related to what we do day to day. I work in domain names so we ask to parse a domain name. There are oddities with domain names so we check multiple things: does the candidate know what basic string manipulation functions exist? do they ask questions to get more info? how do they react when we give additional info that break the co…

>you'd be surprised of the results

I wouldn't because my company has been burned before by hiring people who would otherwise have been filtered by your test. I'd say your test is the kind of responsible, yet reasonable test I'd like to see every company adopt some form of.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#355

Post by jboy55 »

eismcc wrote: post #163
brhsagain wrote: post #148

All of these supposed "flaws" of leetcode are by design. Big companies want people who are smart enough to do the work, but obedient enough to put up with all the bullshit that comes with working at a big company. What person better matches that than someone who's able and willing to study for and pass a tech version of the SAT? Every anti-leetcode article I read is some version of "leetcode is bad because it measure…

This reminds me of the interview process at Thinking Machines, where the interview was working onsite for a week and then getting voted on. Or Pixar which required you to excel in atleast one thing in your life

Re: Thinking machines. If you are looking at moving on from your current company, and are evaluating 6 companies, you have to bank up 6 weeks of PTO to 'try to work' at various companies for a week?

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#356

Post by lostcolony »

Cwizard wrote: post #85

Having taken some interviews myself I can see some value in having the interviewee do some small coding exercise when they do not have any personal projects to show. I think it can filter out some false positives of candidates that can talk well but can’t actually write code (you’d be surprised how many candidates can’t) What surprises me most is the lack of flexibility in the process. If a candidate shows up with a…

Yeah; that's what I've preferred to do. Interestingly, I've had just as good results with the hires I've made regardless of the process used, from whiteboard coding that is little more than fizzbuzz, to actual pairing with an engineer on a real problem, to leetcode, across multiple different companies. Maybe the softer parts of the the interview, which was largely the same (and prioritized people who could talk intelligently about stuff on their resume, those who when led to places they had no experience were comfortable saying "I don't know" or similar, and those who seemed interested in learning new things), was better for distinguishing mediocre from excellent (with the coding being helpful for distinguishing imposters from everyone else).

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#357

Post by bruce343434 »

ehnto wrote: post #204
bruce343434 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it kept happening for seniors and people with a lot of experience Why would this be? Old brains not being as "flexible" to think up novel solutions?

The tests aren't testing for competency at the job, and after a decade of experience writing software you have long ago realized that party tricks and cute algorithms are a fairly rare part of the job (generalizing here of course), so you stop thinking about them as much and get out of practice. When they do show up, you certainly don't have to do them in 10 minutes, and I think everyone would rather you didn't anywa…

>write a robust solution rather than a clever one

but why must it be mutually exclusive? Are you implying all "robust" solutions, whatever that means, are dumb? Surely you put some thought in it to make it "robust"?

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#358

Post by biztos »

s17n wrote: post #239
brandall10 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every unicorny startup I've interviewed w/ that had a standard big-tech interview loop (1 LC style screener + final w/ 2-3 rounds of LC + 1 system design) was chock full of ex-big tech engineers and managers, replete with stories about wanting a faster paced / dynamic environment. So yes, that absolutely is who they are recruiting. It probably comes down to no more than believing big tech companies have the very best…

> More than obedience, it probably is the aspect that they're smart and determined to succeed. Yup that's what it's about! The problem with trying to test how good you are at the job is that you simply can't do it in a 1 hour (or even a 1 day) interview. You can however assess how smart somebody is, which is definitely correlated to job performance. It's also connected to growth potential - even if it were somehow po…

> You can however assess how smart somebody is

Are you saying the Leetcode-style interview assesses how smart someone is?

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#359

Post by jboy55 »

jmvoodoo wrote: post #244
brandall10 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every unicorny startup I've interviewed w/ that had a standard big-tech interview loop (1 LC style screener + final w/ 2-3 rounds of LC + 1 system design) was chock full of ex-big tech engineers and managers, replete with stories about wanting a faster paced / dynamic environment. So yes, that absolutely is who they are recruiting. It probably comes down to no more than believing big tech companies have the very best…

I wonder which came first? Did they hire those people because they implemented leetcode style interviews, or did they implement those interviews because they originally hired or were founded by ex-bigco folks that simply did what they knew?

Perhaps there's another collectively shared work experience that also created leetcode style interviews. That is dealing with someone who has a degree, can speak well of what it takes to code, but who cannot code to save their life. I have known more than a dozen such "engineers". That's the reason you code during an interview, I think the emphasis on optimal O(N) is just a set of engineers who don't believe it should be "that easy" and doesn't really help produce more of a signal.

My coding question, for example,

You have a music player that should be playing a 900 song list randomly. You notice that you keep hearing a song being repeated during your drive and you are curious if its truly random. You also keep hitting skip in the hopes a particular song comes up. Write a piece of code that simulates this.

You should tell me three things; 1) the number of songs played before a repeat occurs 2) how many songs needed to be played before you played them all 3) after you succeed in playing them all, how many times has the most common song been played.

You can use libraries if you know them, and you can use the built in sort method in the language, I will google it for you if you don't remember the syntax.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#360

Post by anon23anon »

hiq wrote: post #88
Dowwie wrote: post #75

Someone who builds a truly novel technology solution involving hundreds of hours of effort gets filtered out of an interview involving contrived scenarios. You may have built the next generation X, but given an array of strings and a fixed width, can you format the text such that each line has exactly maxWidth characters and is fully justified -- in the next 30 minutes? Maybe you should have cultivated that skillset…

> Someone who builds a truly novel technology solution involving hundreds of hours of effort This person should already have enough of a reputation to get a job at many companies, if their work is public enough. What do you suggest for the 99%+ other candidates?

They 100% can get a job and a decent one. I know because I fall into this category BUT the FANG salary are 2 to 2.5 times what I make at this point which pushes me down the study leetcode part.
Post reply on HN