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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

#551

Post by oooyay »

There's a way you end the feedback loop that encourages leet code, the people who endorse it. Openly commit that your focus in hiring evaluations will be on real world problem solving specific to each service team and that each service team must maintain 3-4 hacking challenges that are direct representations of their work. For most of us that's "perform a code review of this junior engineers undocumented code", "add some specific functionality to this API", "add functionality to this API without breaking contracts and show me how you ensure it's not broken".

That creates variety in the question bank, standardizes evaluation, and will only encourage engineers who really want to work on your stack and product combination.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#552

Post by JKCalhoun »

bradlys wrote: post #484
JKCalhoun wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what you're saying but I don't think there is any kind of nefarious backroom discussion that goes on to this purpose. I think more likely though are the accidental favoritism in the industry where engineers submit resumes of other engineers they know who are looking for a job who, surprise, are also white males. I don't believe it is either racist or sexist however. It's just "who people know". Nonetheless, yo…

Where are you working that it’s white males? 80% of my colleagues are Chinese and Indian. This is usually the case at most of my jobs that aren’t early stage startups.

You're right. I am old though and it has been a shifting demographic.

At the same time, it seemed like the resumes passed in came disproportionately from the white males.

But at the same time this is just from memory so maybe I'm full of shit or its confirmation bias.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#553

Post by mihaitodor »

CSMastermind wrote: post #51

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 ta…

> In spite of this, there's no better interview type I've seen proposed given the constraints most companies are under

Yeah, right. Why would companies truly care about this issue and put any effort into making their hiring process feel less hostile when they still have loads of candidates who are more than willing to go through whatever tests they get asked during interviews? It's a leaky bucket and they're happy with the status quo while developers keep grinding away... I doubt it will change anytime soon, but I'm glad I can afford to put my foot down and refuse to do such interviews when I need to find new jobs.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#554

Post by jasonm23 »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #483
Aurornis wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Trying…

there is a lot of stupid bullshit in most orgs, and things only get fixed by often irritable, unreasonable people. "shut up and do it" was only an acceptable answer when I was in the military. if the interviewee pushes back and find they don't like the answer, then it's a good signal to both parties.

If that's what you want it's a good signal, many companies also already have their quota of irritable, unreasonable people.

Sometimes we want harmony and not drama.

Knowing how to push forward without being abrasive is a more valuable trait.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#555

Post by jandrewrogers »

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…

FWIW, I have come across examples in the wild of engineers who were extraordinarily polished and facile at everything leetcode, and poor at computer science. Not many, but some. This is a somewhat recent phenomenon.

Best tests are simple and common computer science problems in algorithms and data structures with no tractable solutions. There is no facile answer, you truly have to reason from first principles for any particular scenario because there is no alternative.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#556

Post by EnergyAmy »

soerxpso wrote: post #519
EnergyAmy wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Offtopic, but there's an interesting parallel between making a mistake like that and AI hallucination. In a human, that behavior is a positive signal, but for many people, that same behavior is proof of how LLMs are just a toy that will never rival human intelligence.

The difference is that an LLM isn't very good at saying "I'm a fucking idiot" and changing it when asked to double-check (unless you handhold it in the direction of the exact error it's meant to be looking for). Humans recognize their own hallucinations. There's not really any promising work towards getting AI to do the same.

Have you tried it? They're actually pretty good at it in a lot of scenarios. It's not flawless, but they're only getting better.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#557

Post by chuckadams »

krackers wrote: post #521
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…

>shuffle a deck of cards Fwiw this is surprisingly subtle and non-trivial to get right. A naive "random swap" approach does not produce uniform permutations. Sorting based on a random comparison function can likewise produce biased results depending on the implementation of the sort. Tagging each element with a random number and then sorting based on the tag works (or so I think?) but you need to deal with the case w…

The problem isn’t about getting the perfect answer, it’s about observing the process, and conversing about the answer afterwards. I’d be fine hiring the candidate who whiffs the shuffle but knows about Fisher-Yeats and says they’d look for a well-tested implementation and drop it in. I mean that can’t be their answer to everything, but evidence of real experience should grant a Mulligan now and then. Coding interviews cannot be code themselves.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#558

Post by jonkho »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #542
jonkho wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that a claim cannot be made that categorically LC tests are generally a test on memorization. It appears your point does not disprove that. You mention exceptions, that in fact proves the general rule is true (I.e your claim isn’t of the form: most leet code questions of almost any level cannot answered without spending 45 mins and requiring specialized domain knowledge as a prerequisite). You cannot argu…

You can disagree, but I and many others can very much make a claim. I argue it can even be a well supported claim. Your personal disagreement isn't a refutal of any and all claims. >You cannot argue against general rule by pointing out specialized exceptions. Lertcode hards in interviews have been getting more common for a decade now. At what point do we stop pretending that more cats aren't losing their 4th leg and…

Again, my initial purpose of responding to the OP was his perspective is formed by his own ability, a trap you also fall into. Again, Higher mountain climbers and all. Lower climbers are more numerous and will agree and validate their experience amongst themselves as a group - and indeed they are the larger voice. Feel free to have the last word.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#559

Post by kidintech »

dvt wrote: post #524
kidintech wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

realistically we're looking for much higher (sub 1%) cognitive ability. I understand this is highly sought after, so we incentivize by paying a few times what FAANG does locally. I was genuinely wondering how OP preferred to be approached vis-a-vis this sort of assessment, since they suggested that they would walk out on conventional approaches. I mentioned cognitive ability and ability to learn as I feel those are h…

> realistically we're looking for much higher (sub 1%) cognitive ability. Weird requirement, why? Even places like RenTech don't specifically look for the top <1% cognitive ability (and they quite literally print money).

> places like RenTech don't specifically look for the top There is no way more than 1 out of 100 arbitrarily sampled humans can win Putnam or get tenure in pure math/physics/etc. at an Ivy.

Re: I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

#560

Post by kidintech »

dvt wrote: post #523
kidintech wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> They would write code at most 20% of the time, and the job has many other nuances. You're being very nebulous and without knowing exactly what you're hiring for, it's hard for me to recommend a process.

In this particular discussion, I am not looking for the best process for the task. I am looking for a process that will not get deemed a "red flag" by candidates.
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