For one, the proposed alternative seems to boil down to "give me special treatment" which is not a great look. For another, there is no perfect screening process, only tradeoffs between throughput, accuracy, and cost. Finally, if you think this very common interviewing process is "humiliating" then you're going to absolutely hate the hour to hour of most jobs...
It is humiliating to have to do LeetCode grinding for
61–70 of 133 posts
Re: It is humiliating to have to do LeetCode grinding for
#62[flagged]
boycotting the thing that puts a roof over your head is a luxury few can afford
SWEs will happily tell you that their profession is such a highly demanded activity and they don't need a union because the pay/benefits are so excellent.
However, I think this comment highlights the fact that swes are not some privileged elite above at least some of the benefits of organized labour.
the leetcode will continue until union perception improves.
Re: It is humiliating to have to do LeetCode grinding for
#63If you think something you have to do in an interview is “humiliating” when all they’re asking you to do is demonstrate some skill on a whiteboard you have some self-reflection to do. I don’t personally think leetcode is that great for interviews but candidates who act like it’s above them to figure out problems etc have a serious problem. In other fields this is not only completely normal but absolutely something pe…
Author's point is not that it's too simple but that it is not relevant. It's not similar to asking a mathematician to do first year math problems, it's asking them to, dunno, remember obscure regulations on accounting.
You got it backwards. It's like asking an accountant to do basic math. I don't trust you to handle my money if you can't even do that.
Re: It is humiliating to have to do LeetCode grinding for
#64It is hard to prove what you achieved in other companies.
I don't like competitive programming but at least it is an objective measure. Most criterias in interviews are subjective.
Re: It is humiliating to have to do LeetCode grinding for
#65> I have written more code than most people
If by most people you mean non-programmers, then maybe. Otherwise it sounds like a whining of a B-player who just realized they've never had skills sufficient for NFL.
The fact of the matter is the better you're in understanding CS and the underlying mathematical domains, the easier the leetcode questions get, it always has been and always will be. And contrary to most beliefs, you don't have to memorize individual problems. You learn the domains of problems and solve them with the same repeating methods. But most people just prefer spending their time on infortainment and being presumptious on Twitter, than actually learning stuff.
Re: It is humiliating to have to do LeetCode grinding for
#66What bugs me is applying for Haskell/Rust/Scala roles and they make me leetcode in Python which I never use.
Re: It is humiliating to have to do LeetCode grinding for
#67If you think something you have to do in an interview is “humiliating” when all they’re asking you to do is demonstrate some skill on a whiteboard you have some self-reflection to do. I don’t personally think leetcode is that great for interviews but candidates who act like it’s above them to figure out problems etc have a serious problem. In other fields this is not only completely normal but absolutely something pe…
I like leetcode, and I think the practice is defensible. To be fair, I've made a lot of mental loops to get there.
However, I'm also sympathetic to the "leetcode is useless because you don't do it in your day to day" camp.
I used to lean more towards my mental loop side. But nowadays there has been a big question due to a recent job interview I did.
I recently applied to become a data analyst at a F500 company. It seemed fun and the pay was marginally better than what my software engineering career has been (as I'm not from the US).
I remember that when I applied, I didn't even know what a data analyst was. However, they gave me a technical assessment and I aced it.
Zero prep
Completely aced it
They told me that their work sample round was indicative of the job, so if I could do that, then according to them: I could do the job. It took me 4 hours in total.
Of course, there are tech companies that do this. However, I was a bit stunned that this was so easy. To be fair, getting in wasn't easy as I applied to some data analyst positions for fun to other companies and they all mentioned "you have 0 years of experience in this role". So I was lucky in that sense, and I was also lucky that they were willing to look at the person as opposed to treating me as a number.
There have been 2 tech interviews so far that went the same way. With that I mean: 0 prep, just using your skills and you got in based on those skills.
Look, I like leetcode, but after my recent experience I'm just not sure if it's the best way to assess talent. One could make the argument that it's an easier role? But I don't think it is, I find CRUD relatively easy too which has been most of my job. Though, there was this one week where my leetcode skills really helped as the company had a genuine novel leetcode hard style type of question.
Re: It is humiliating to have to do LeetCode grinding for
#68> I have written more code than most people and I still will be judged for not being able to solve a coding question Why would you fail it though if you have written more code than most people (assuming most people means most people in tech and not most people worldwide in general since most people are not software developers), and published in A* venues
I publish and maintain dozens of open source packages that are downloaded millions of times per year and I couldn’t off the top of my head implement a bubble sort. Because why the heck would I ever do that? The point is that LeetCode does not test the actual skill set of writing useful code, it tests how much you’ve grinded LeetCode.
No one would ask you to implement bubble sort, or a specific algorithm.
They would ask you to solve a problem
Re: It is humiliating to have to do LeetCode grinding for
#69[deleted]
Re: It is humiliating to have to do LeetCode grinding for
#70If you think something you have to do in an interview is “humiliating” when all they’re asking you to do is demonstrate some skill on a whiteboard you have some self-reflection to do. I don’t personally think leetcode is that great for interviews but candidates who act like it’s above them to figure out problems etc have a serious problem. In other fields this is not only completely normal but absolutely something pe…
There's possibly some worldview mismatch on your comment, because leetcode isn't "basic scales" programming for any specialty. It's much closer to expect your world famous violin player to sing on the stage than it is to expect them to play scales on the violin. But then, maybe not. Some people call all kinds of random exercises by "leetcode". The author may be one of those, I don't know if anybody can know this.
Basic data structures and algorithms knowledge is a base skill that will translate to better success in any software job. Yes you may not be coding graphs in your day job (although you might - I have personally done it before), but someone who can grasp stuff like BFS vs DFS and Dijkstra's algorithm will absolutely be better at the job than someone who comes in and says "idk who cares, I'll just use a library".