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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

#51

Post by CSMastermind »

The important thing to screen a software engineer for is not knowledge but the strength of their problem solving and ability to build mental models of problems.

Whiteboard interviews are a good way to evaluate these skills - assuming the candidate hasn't seen this particular problem before and the interviewer understands that this is what they're supposed to look for.

Goodhart's law applies - the measure becomes a target and it ceases to be a good measure.

People who have weak problem solving skills or poor abilities to form mental models still want high paying software jobs so they "grind leetcode" until they can pass these interviews.

Then over time these grinders get high enough up they start becoming interviewers themselves and they don't understand that they're even supposed to screen for talent, they conduct the interview like a memory test since to them that's what it was.

In spite of this, there's no better interview type I've seen proposed given the constraints most companies are under (don't waste candidate's time, have a consistent rubric that HR likes, etc.) so for now we're going to keep using it.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#53

Post by stavros »

SSchick wrote: post #5

Isn't the entire point of memoizing this to demonstrate you are able to study/grind rather than prove intelligence? Different companies/managers have give me different reasons for the usage of this style of interview but it was usually to 'assess ability to get through rough stuff' and 'assess cognitive abilities'. Idk anymore either and I refuse to conduct these interviews. I generally prefer somewhat realistic prob…

The entire point of memoizing is to only ever do the interview once.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#54

Post by Wilya »

fvdessen wrote: post #9

The unfortunate reality is that If you don't do this you'll hire people who can't program

It depends how it is done. I used to think the same way, and I would never hire someone without having seen them program live.

But having experienced leetcode-style interviews on the candidate side, it's clear to me that they are no longer about figuring out and coding a solution on the spot. Interviewers expected a solution FAST, and to match that you need to have studied and learned the answer beforehand.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#55

Post by KeplerBoy »

CSDude wrote: post #40

I agree it's not a great way but a good compromise. When you think of Leetcode you can be thinking of hard questions. But this is not the case for many of us. Not all of us get a chance to work with a great candidate pool. So, whenever someone fails to provide a solution given an integer list, find the pairs that sum is equal to N, I don't care how many technologies they have worked with or how well they can talk abo…

There's a spectrum to this. Testing easy questions seems fair and appropriate.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#56

Post by 369548684892826 »

emodendroket wrote: post #22
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'm sure anyone determined to do so can act unfairly regardless of what process is in place, but the fact that there is a standardized test in my mind does the opposite and makes the process much fairer. Assuming a fair-minded interviewer, the process gives a chance to a candidate whose resume may have less vaunted names on it to demonstrate their skill. I'm quite sure that I'd never have had some of the opportunitie…

> the fact that there is a standardized test in my mind does the opposite and makes the process much fairer

The problem isn't standardized tests, it's that leetcode questions are about having the time to have learnt the answer beforehand, rather than raw ability for problem solving.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#57

Post by radicalbyte »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #39

Hot take: I like leetcode-style interviews and I've spent a lot of time in them on both sides of the fence (tens of hours as a candidate, hundreds as an interviewer). > But yet, these interviews quiz me on things that I can easily Google that I may not know off the top of my head. It’s absurd. I don't work at Google so I'm lucky to have freedom in the way I interview engineers and usually I try to squeeze out the qui…

I like giving SWEs small coding problems but it's more of a filter against:

a) The 90% of applicants who literally cannot code. Although I filter out 99.9% of those by screening CVs and a short telephone interview.

b) They can be a point for more discussion.

It's silly to give someone, in an interview setting, an exam question style problem and to make that a key factor in the interview. It's up there with giving someone tasks which could potentially take them an evening just for an interview.

I've tried everything and I've had the best results by talking, digging into the details. Not only do you get a better idea of the person but it's really easy to rat out those who are less capable (especially those who've studied hard for exam questions but fail at everything else).

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#58

Post by fzeroracer »

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…

How do you know they produce false negatives over false positives? How do you know if your top candidates simply didn't cheat over the honest candidates that produced worse but honest code?

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#59

Post by codegladiator »

Kichererbsen wrote: post #19

The last few interviews I've run, I've shown the candidate sample code and asked them to review it. We have samples that have at least one bug / problem per line. Then some modeling task (whiteboard). We have some simple exercises (fizzbuzz style) to figure out if juniors actually can junior and as a springboard into discussing topics like runtime complexity, memory layout and stuff. This is all highly interactive, d…

I use this

https://github.com/emilybache/GildedRose-Refactoring-Kata

in their favorite language. Has been a very effective filter

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#60

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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