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Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

fev.al

441–450 of 675 posts

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#441

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…

I'd agree with this. If they want people to crank out the product they have in mind... Test for hte ability to crank code.

And in that case the leetcode interview may actually be very valid, and not even evil!

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#442

Studies show that one of the most effective interviewing tools is a test for general mental ability: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-validity-and-utili... Now, IQ tests are of dubious legality, at least in the US, but algorithmic coding questions basically get you an IQ test crossed with a programming skill check: win-win. All the ire about how you don't actually invert binary trees or whatnot during your r…

Bingo! I like how all these arm-chair HNers who have never run a successful company or built a public-facing product used by millions suddenly are experts at how to build a successful company. Yeah, you know how Search serves 4 Billion people or people created Chrome or gmail in their 20% free time? Because they could leet code and not use Stack Overflow as a crutch. Sure, not all companies need leet code. But someon…

Nah man, nice try, but you're wrong. I worked at Google on at least one of the codebases you're talking about, and I can tell you that the "skills" that most Google interviews test for are almost never applied there. Certainly not in an "on the spot" format either.

Most of the work @ Google, especially on an established codebase like Chromium (my experience), is about slow incremental engineering in very small bits and pieces doing mostly really mundane administrative things. And when there's 'core algorithm' type stuff to do, there's plenty of time and space to stop, consider, read the literature, and move on from there. Nobody is going to put a gun to your head and put you on a clock and then score your results like in an interview.

Most of the intractable difficult problems at Google are more "how to get there from here" and organizational; how can I pile up this series of code reviews over months to get to this final destination where this system is cleaned up or more efficient or this feature implemented/implementable.

Google's use of algorithm testing in the coding interview is simply a result of the fact that they have hundreds of thousands of applicants and need a way to filter in some repeatable and measurable fashion.

And it's worth pointing out that the interview process @ Google goes through a whole series of metrics & calibration towards that effort. It's not just "could solve this problem", it's "solve this problem according to interviewer X's satisfaction, but we've calibrated interviewer X's scores at level N, so adjust according to that" and so on. There's an attempt to be scientific about it.

Most other companies applying "leetcode" are not doing that, they often simply have a highly reductionist mental model of what "software engineering" is, which IMHO doesn't accord with the reality of the profession.

Are you lucky to work at a company that gets thousands of resumes from seemingly qualified people a day? Probably not.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#443
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?

>This person should already have enough of a reputation to get a job at many companies, if their work is public enough. You can't just hire someone based on their reputation at a company of any maturity. That's a legal and HR nightmare. There has to be a process with a semblance of objectivity, and that process has to demonstrably apply to everyone equally, always.

Hiring based on reputation is the same as hiring based on resume. And it's extremely common in almost any company. Why would it be a legal or HR nightmare?

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#444
> A first alternative is to look at some of the candidate’s code to begin with.

This is biased towards people who code for free in their free time. I'd call this terrible advice for most companies, since it filters out the vast majority of qualified candidates.

I have some open source contributions on my GH account, but none of them are representative of how I code since they are all bug fixes and/or small enhancements which are shoehorned into an existing codebase, since my goal is to add a feature with the smallest number of code changes (in order to increase the likelihood of a PR getting accepted).

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#445

Studies show that one of the most effective interviewing tools is a test for general mental ability: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-validity-and-utili... Now, IQ tests are of dubious legality, at least in the US, but algorithmic coding questions basically get you an IQ test crossed with a programming skill check: win-win. All the ire about how you don't actually invert binary trees or whatnot during your r…

Bingo! I like how all these arm-chair HNers who have never run a successful company or built a public-facing product used by millions suddenly are experts at how to build a successful company. Yeah, you know how Search serves 4 Billion people or people created Chrome or gmail in their 20% free time? Because they could leet code and not use Stack Overflow as a crutch. Sure, not all companies need leet code. But someon…

The people that invented Google search werent leetcoders. The people that maintain it are

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#446
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?

>This person should already have enough of a reputation to get a job at many companies, if their work is public enough. You can't just hire someone based on their reputation at a company of any maturity. That's a legal and HR nightmare. There has to be a process with a semblance of objectivity, and that process has to demonstrably apply to everyone equally, always.

Which in practice means you put out a fake job posting where the qualifications uncannily mirror this persons resume to a tee, and you hand them the job formally after a week.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#447
post #65

I recently failed interviews at Google and Amazon, exactly at this sort of algorithmic problems. And that's quite far from my client application daily job. I knew it's not my strong side, I would have applied before they approached me otherwise. Now I can tell everyone - I knew quicker than Google, that I'm not the right fit ;)

I have mine at the Brazilian river company tomorrow! I look forward to coming out of that experience with lower self confidence

Haha, good luck! Some people say working for the big ones is a golden cage. Maybe I'm made for living in the wild ;)

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#448
post #239

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…

And algorithmic questions are a straightforward way to get a scalable, structured interview round. It's difficult to entirely replace algorithmic rounds with questions that are both scalable and structured.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#449
post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don’t necessarily think leetcode should be the only litmus test for a candidate but Max is an outlier. Not every candidate getting rejected by a leetcode question is also capable of building out homebrew on their free time.

Re: Stop Interviewing with Leet Code

#450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can however assess how smart somebody is Why not just give candidates a standard IQ test then? They are probably more reliable than Leetcode...

IQ does not tell determination/hard-working-attitude at all, in fact many with high IQ ended up being nobody, as high IQ makes learning relatively easier, most got used to that and just let the 'grit' go. leetcode is the SAT for coding, not perfect, but at least it's close to fair play.

> leetcode is the SAT for coding, not perfect, but at least it's close to fair play.

It would be amazing if leetcode were like the SAT, and you could just get one good score and then never think about it again.

Anything like that would make it much lower-friction to switch between FAANGs (and friends), though, which I suspect is a big part of why they've settled on doing things this way.

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