61–70 of 94 posts
I would rather hire someone who has evidence of working on prior projects than someone who can solve brain teasers. There are many people who excel at LeetCode but struggle to build even simple software.
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I was looking at the Meta interview guide and it says: > Let us know if you’ve seen the problem previously and also: > In your tech screen, you’ll be asked to solve two problems in roughly 35 minutes. Practice coding solutions to medium and hard problems in less than 15 minutes each to help you be ready for the constraints during the interview. The only way I could solve two problems in 35 minutes is if I've seen the…
This was basically my experience in college too. There was no time to understand something, and tests didn't test your understanding. If you tried to solve a proof for the first time you'd run out of time and fail. You just had to grind homework and book questions until you could shit them out in 5 minutes each.
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people would usually ask for what the 'trick' is and you won't be able to give the correct answer if you lie like that
A lot of the kinds of questions you'd want to skip have no trick. Also, presumably, if the question is to be swapped then they will not demand a full answer before doing the swap. I think it's stupid to try to judge if someone has seen the question before. The only time it's wrong to have seen the question before is if someone tipped you off to that specific company's questions. I think that most people are not good…
It doesn't matter if it is 'stupid', or 'wrong', or whatever other cope you want to invent, people will do it and if your caught in a lie because you do not even know the answer to that, you've disqualified yourself immediately and potentially get blackballed as a liar.
If I've caught such an immediate lie as an interviewer, I'd be a bit relieved on some level because I now have a legit excuse to end the interview series early and go do something else and save my coworkers from doing interviews, because for most interviewers, they are chores.
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This was basically my experience in college too. There was no time to understand something, and tests didn't test your understanding. If you tried to solve a proof for the first time you'd run out of time and fail. You just had to grind homework and book questions until you could shit them out in 5 minutes each.
Unfortunately, employers aren’t hiring people to “understand” anything either. They are hiring fungible human resources who can follow instructions and grid out solutions. It took me years to understand this and I don’t like it, but it’s how most of the industry works.
A good senior developer should be able to go out to lunch and know if the candidate has the skills and the right cultural match by the end. There's no need for coding tests or whiteboarding problems. I've seen some of the best developers I've worked with in 40 years of coding get turned away by Google and Apple because of their terrible interview processes. The only thing better than going out to lunch is working wit…
Also at large scale you cannot trust the entire corpus of employees since your are well beyond dunbars number, so the process is there to prevent cheater and nepotism clusters forming where random employees hire their incompetent drinking buddies or cousins after a single "lunch".
That process works for small companies, and it's an advantage they should leverage, it does not work for the large ones.
IMO you need work sample tests as a minimum, which means a coding assignment. Some people are great bullshitters at lunch.
Leetcode is just a proxy for an IQ test. That's it. If you can study up and do well on leetcode, then you're smart. People getting hung up on how realistic the questions are, or whether you ever need to implement X data structure are confused. Fact is that no job can give a reasonable test for how it is to work there short of working there. There's team dynamics, developer / project fit, etc etc. All you can ever do…
IQ test questions are explicitly designed to be things you haven't seen before, solved within minutes per problem. If you've seen them before then the validity of the test is usually invalidated. Leetcode is effectively the opposite, because each one is usually a CS paper by itself, which by definition took a very hard problem a long time for a very smart person to create and test the solution. You cannot practically…
Believe it or not, most humans on earth can study as long as they want for leetcode and still won't do well on them. If you can drill and study for them and your scores improve... bam: that's the IQ test.
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I don’t know that people generally have a problem with testing their knowledge, I think most people that hate on Leetcode (including myself) just don’t like to code in front of strangers in a timed setting like that. I’ve never been good at tests in school. I probably averaged Cs on tests through college. Projects though? Aced them every time and sometimes got pulled aside and told I was highly exceeding the projects…
Yeah. Call it stage fright or performance anxiety or whatever you want. It doesn't matter if you want me to write code for you, being around other people makes me anxious and I can't think properly. I'm less anxious now compared to when I started my career, but coding interviews are the worst.
1. You're a newgrad. You have no work history, but you do have a lot of time on your hands and a desire to prove yourself. Go study leetcode and prove how awesome you are.
2. You're a senior engineer who has a small network (not a dig, lots of great developers are introverted and have small networks, myself included). In this case, it sucks but... just practice leetcode. Don't worry, the fact that you're a good engineer means you'll pick it up quickly. It's not the same skill as professional software development, but there's a ton of skill transfer, and it might even be a little fun.
Time crunch, test anxiety etc, those can be overcome by practicing. A lot of times really smart people are averse to practicing since they never had to do it in school. But, I'm telling you, any smart dev can learn to leetcode well while being timed. It'll be fine
Leetcode is just a proxy for an IQ test. That's it. If you can study up and do well on leetcode, then you're smart. People getting hung up on how realistic the questions are, or whether you ever need to implement X data structure are confused. Fact is that no job can give a reasonable test for how it is to work there short of working there. There's team dynamics, developer / project fit, etc etc. All you can ever do…
I agree. One could say that just administering proper iq test would be better but that would be seen as insulting or whatever and also potentially illegal so people resort to elaborate challenges like lc
I have always seen LeetCode problems as effectively hazing rituals in a job interview setting. A high pressure interview situation simply won’t bring out peak problem-solving capabilities in many people. At best you get some superficial insight into someone’s problem solving methodology, but at worst you filter out otherwise excellent fits for not being able to solve an ultimately inconsequential problem under pressu…
At a certain point companies prefer employees who can memorize lots of trivial information and perform at a high level while being constantly monitored for adequate performance. Leetcode pop quizzes are excellent tests for this within an hour: POSIWID.[0] Should you work at these companies? Is this kind of employee optimal for company performance at an any given company size? I don’t have these answers. [0] https://e…
At this point I think it's a self perpetuating system, like medical residency sleep deprivation or 'accrediation', which incidentally makes changing hospitals a 6 month BS process for any doctor.
A certain segment of engineers voraciously and autistically defend the leetcode interview since they were selected by it and probably like competitive coding and they are exhausting to deal with. The sane reformers eventually give up and leave them to their empire of dirt since nobody gets promoted for changing these things in big tech companies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was looking at the Meta interview guide and it says: > Let us know if you’ve seen the problem previously and also: > In your tech screen, you’ll be asked to solve two problems in roughly 35 minutes. Practice coding solutions to medium and hard problems in less than 15 minutes each to help you be ready for the constraints during the interview. The only way I could solve two problems in 35 minutes is if I've seen the…
This was basically my experience in college too. There was no time to understand something, and tests didn't test your understanding. If you tried to solve a proof for the first time you'd run out of time and fail. You just had to grind homework and book questions until you could shit them out in 5 minutes each.
Sure, if the course is very poorly designed or the student is very unmotivated, they may end up just memorizing everything while somehow avoiding understanding anything. But in real life, when someone says "Oh I understand it, just give me thirty minutes to solve it" and others "shit them out" in 5 minutes, it's usually the shitters who are ready to advance to the next level.