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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

#441

Post by lupusreal »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #193
lupusreal wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is ironic considering these companies have forced mandatory DEI seminars (which I have no problem with btw), inclusive language, #EveryoneCanCode, and so on. I really do wonder what those sanctimonious sermons are meant to accomplish. People who are already ideologically aligned with them won't learn anything new and may just resent it, while people who aren't aligned won't become aligned as a result of that "…

They're supposed to absolve the corporation and its leadership of responsibility and liability. By giving that training they get to claim they did all they could.

I think that's precisely right.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#442

Post by SCLeo »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #422
raincole wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To you, someone who doesn't know which namespace HashMap belongs to is like someone who can't do 3 * 7...? Not sure it's a satire about interviewer stereotype or...

in all fairness, Java.util isn't some esoteric namespace. But the fact that you can do years of Java without touching core Java libraries (e.g. maybe you're highly reliant on DI, or have a proprietary library at work) does make it hard to properly gauge with. I'd say it's a fine question if interviewers stopped treating their technical tests like trade secrets and just said "okay, interview is next week, make sure yo…

I think most people just start typing "HashM..." and trigger auto complete, and hit tab to import and auto complete HashMap.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#443

Post by KaiserPro »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #410
KaiserPro wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Leetcode interviews do a decent job at this. I mean it doesn't, because I'm at a FAANG, At a FAANG you are infantalised from the very start, sure you passed a very difficult interview where you have to balance a binary tree efficiently as possible. But you're going to use none of those skills here. what you actually end up doing is copy/pasting some random code you found using internal code search, because the sens…

>But you're going to use none of those skills here. FAANGs want the top .1% of developers, they don't necessarily need them for most roles. But the point is to hire developers that you could put into any role in the company within reason and have them be successful. 99% of development work at a FAANG is pretty unexceptional and doesn't require exceptional developers. They hire for that exceptional 1%.

> FAANGs want the top .1% of developers,

FAANGS want a load of loyal, naive people who are willing to work loads of overtime and not ask too many questions. Who better than posh kids from great universities who haven't quite figured out that life isn't a meritocracy yet!?

Sure they also want the top 0.1%, but they have a different interview track. Do you think all those OpenAI engineers that were going to follow Altman were asked to do leetcode?

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#444

Post by lupusreal »

workingjubilee wrote: post #228
lupusreal wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is ironic considering these companies have forced mandatory DEI seminars (which I have no problem with btw), inclusive language, #EveryoneCanCode, and so on. I really do wonder what those sanctimonious sermons are meant to accomplish. People who are already ideologically aligned with them won't learn anything new and may just resent it, while people who aren't aligned won't become aligned as a result of that "…

struggle sessions usually involve public torture or executions. it's laughable to compare "being mildly inconvenienced" with that.

Struggle sessions in their basic form used social coercement to extract confessions of guilt against some collective cause. This describes the DEI training sessions I've been in well. Admit that you have bias (effectively confessing guilt to a "crime" that gives your employer leverage over you) or get dogpiled and have your refusal to admit guilt cast as evidence of your guilt anyway.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#445

Post by beej71 »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #49
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…

Bingo. A good hire is a windfall, a bad hire can be an existential threat to the team or the entire company.

But you hired them at-will, right? The bad hires I've seen that are existential threats were only there because management refused to fire them.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#446

Post by CoastalCoder »

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.

Some years ago I was remotely interviewing at Google, and I was asked to code up the reversal of a linked list. But my brain just froze.

This is something I can easily solve in 5-10 minutes, correctly handling every plausible corner-case.

I'm curious how common this is, statistically speaking. I'm also curious how it correlates with other things about the interviewee.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#447

Post by lupusreal »

ljm wrote: post #288
lupusreal wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that in 99% of cases "software engineer" is just an aggrandizing title given by management to any and every programmer at their company should put a bullet in the head of the pretentions of this being an engineering field.

The term is used ubiquitously in the field of technology and has been for a long time. We also have Tech or Software Architects, and quite obviously they don't do Real Architecture™ or civil engineering, but the concept makes sense. It's just a job title, arguably one without the protections or standards afforded to chartered engineers, and with an incredibly low barrier to entry. Pretty much the reason we have to do…

> It's just a job title

Exactly my point.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#448

Post by weatherlite »

vgalin wrote: post #329
pprotas wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Age does not hinder you in solving leetcode problems

But the older you are, the more likely it is that you have built a family and have children and responsibilities outside of work. You cannot necessarily afford to spend time studying (problems untied to the real world) as much as someone younger I guess.

40 year old here.

I don't think its strictly a time issue, its an energy/motivation issue. 40 minutes of practice a day for a month or two should be sufficient for someone to solve/go over dozens of Leetcode questions. We all, literally all, have that time to spare otherwise we wouldn't touch our phones or ever watch T.V and yet most of us do.

But I don't disagree with you completely. I think the older you get, the more mental resistance you have to do the grind to become good at Leetcode. It just sucks that after 13 years of programming and accomplishing quite a few things I have to do this shit all over again just to get another job that's pretty much the same as I'm doing now - and this knowing that it sucks so bad - that you are reduced to a Leetcode monkey with all your experience, is quite a tough pill to swallow at 40. I am also a bit less inclined to look for a new job in general - I have a kid, have a comfortable job with stable income (well, relatively speaking its stable) etc etc. Sure I can go try chasing FAANG salaries but the reality is for me its psychologically much more comfortable to stay where I am and it may also be sensible when calculating the risk in moving jobs.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#449

Post by bena »

lumb63 wrote: post #294
gumby wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have come to like this approach reasonably well. My current company uses a similarly simple problem to evaluate candidates. For me, it was a breeze, and I thought we’d be hiring slouches left and right. Once I started administering the interview, I realized that the majority of candidates absolutely bomb this simple question for one reason or another. It seems that “able to code a simple problem well” is a far less…

You test the floor, not the ceiling.

Truth is, I'm never looking for "the best", I'm looking for "good enough to do the job competently". Because we can hem and haw over what is best for hours. And we could disagree with what qualities in what proportion make someone "the best". But we can all generally agree with "could do the job". As I've mentioned elsewhere, we're hiring right now and we have the duality of candidates in our pool.

There's one guy who is just a hard no from at least two people in the group. And that translates into a no from the third member simply because we're so adamant that he's not the guy. And there's another who we're all feeling really solid on. Not "the best", but solid floor and we feel they'll be able to learn.

But being able to weed out people who can't even perform the basics despite having a decent resume is invaluable.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#450

Post by johnnyanmac »

swuecho wrote: post #34

The market is so bad, and most interview sucks one way or another. The main reason is interviewer have tens or hundreds application for same position. I have just went through one interview that have 4 rounds. 1. half hour talk 2. 2 hours coding for several crud api. 3. system design project ( I spend 2 days on it. they told I have about a week on it) 4. another half hours with CTO. and then got rejected. (The interv…

>I asked them they told me the position is closed

How generous. One job I asked for an update a few days after my assumedly last interview, 1 week afterwards, and then 3 week afterwards (right before the holidays)... even by the last response the recruiter simply said "we are still evaluating the best project to put you on" or something to that effect.

That was 8 months ago now. Going through 5 rounds of interviews into a rejection sucks, but at least be straight with me.

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