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lemarchr | 4 years ago

My thoughts exactly.

We don’t do LeetCode—our interviews are like regular dev work. Candidates get access to an existing codebase on Github complete with a DB, server, and client. Environments are Dockerized, and every interview's setup is boiled down to a single "make" command (DB init, migration, seed, server, client, tunnelling, etc)

This is what all employers should be doing and the part that Litebulb should really focus their marketing on. Skills based assessments that mimic real-world responsibilities are far more predictive of a successful hiring outcome. If you want to pass LeetCode style interviews, you practice LeetCode style problems. Have you then proved that you can do the job? Sure, if the job is to solve LeetCode challenges; however, it's far more likely your role will involve adding a feature to an existing codebase while keeping all the tests passing, including appropriate test coverage, ensuring your solution is clean and maintainable, etc. Designing a problem set like this is hard, and there is overhead in setting the project up and maintaining it over time. I wish I had the time to design an interview like this.

Without knowing all the details or having gone through the experience myself, I can imagine it being positive for both employers and candidates. I assume a lot of the backlash I'm seeing is an allergic response from previous exposure to other tools that focus more on the automation part to the detriment of candidate experience, such as those selfish, impersonal and awkward as hell asynchronous video interviews.

I'd be willing to give this a chance.

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garyjlin|4 years ago

I completely agree, our marketing message needs to hammer in the concept that a Litebulb interview is pretty much just picking up a ticket off the backlog. We've actually had candidates say that halfway through an interview they forgot they were in an interview.

Also, the biggest problem prepping for tech interviews is that it's a different vertical of skills you're optimizing on. As you said, getting better at LeetCode doesn't necessarily make you a better engineer for the specific job you're being hired on to do. One of our goals at Litebulb is that if you're a good dev, you shouldn't need to prep for any Litebulb interviews. If you do prep, all you're doing is making yourself a better developer in general.