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 pressure.
LeetCode questions as interview questions are mostly theater. Most people who do well on these aren’t actually “solving them” on the fly from scratch. They just happen to have seen the exact same problem before and retake the steps they’ve memorized to get to the answer. Testing whether or not someone can regurgitate the solution they have memorized to a math problem doesn’t tell you much about how they will perform in a truly novel non-contrived constraint problem scenario, which is generally what most dev work entails.
Perhaps if you are working at Bespoke Algorithms ‘R Us, benchmarking this would have more value to your org, but for most dev roles at most companies it is hard to see it as more than a compliance exercise, or maybe even as a tool to weed out those with families that can’t devote the hours/day to LC memorization.
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 them before or it is a variation of a problem I've seen before.
The thing is, all these arguments can apply to any test you do during an interview. It is always under pressure, and it will always be incomplete. You will never know for sure before you actually hire the candidate.
If the interview for a coding job doesn't involve actual coding, how do you know that the candidate can code? What you may get are people who are just really good at selling themselves. Maybe a good fit for the sales department, but not so much for the technical position you are hiring for.
LeetCode is not perfect, but no test is.
As for the "memorization" aspect. You can certainly memorize solutions. But you can't just memorize every character of every solution and regurgitate it perfectly. You will need to make some generalizations, just to fit everything into your brain, and as you type it back, you will probably misremember something, and have to fix the bug or bridge the gap. Those are useful, real life coding skills.
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.
Yes pressure affects people differently. Under stress, my communication skills and creativity improves but my mathematical thinking and problem solving abilities decline (slow down).
Creativity gets in the way of leetcode... Leetcode requires focus; you need to recall only the most relevant techniques for the problem, if you're being too creative and see too many possible solutions and you try to identify the most optimal one, it will slow you down and you will run out of time.
I tend to do better if the problems are more difficult with more time given. I'm built for solving difficult problems without hard time constraints. I'm bad at solving easy problems within limited time slots.
If you hire using LeetCode, you will surround yourself with people who enjoy blogging about LeetCode in their free time.
LeetCode was never about LeetCode, it was always a stand in for culture.
It's now a signal for baseline compliance. That's generally good for companies that require mostly operationalists.
The problem is that anyone can learn to leetcode. If you're interested in doing something new and not just warehousing CS lawyers, you're gonna have to ask better questions than that.
> The problem is that anyone can learn to leetcode. If you're interested in doing something new and not just warehousing CS lawyers, you're gonna have to ask better questions than that.
I think the problem is that everyone thinks they can ask better questions and almost none of those people are qualified to judge their interviewing competency or have data to back themselves up. Every company has its own special interview techniques that it's convinced will lead to the best possible outcomes when those only demonstrably lead to the current staffing. To question any of that means pointing fingers at pretty much everyone and that's a political non-starter.
Leetcode is often one or two rounds. You also get tested for culture and design interviews. This is not ideal but hard to see how FAANGs are gonna do it. I guess FAANGs need operationalists though except for their research arms. Dynamodb works well. Your job is to make it work 0.01% better to save a few mill.
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 is measure some proxies. Leetcode is just a much better proxy than the old "how many ping-pong balls fit in a school bus" questions.
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 of others in the class. I just do well when I can think alone, or when I can actually work toward a solution with a coworker.
I’ve made the companies I work for millions of dollars. But put me in front of a white board and ask me an algorithm question? You’d think I was fresh out of CS101.
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 invent the a leetcode solution from whole cloth if you treat it like an IQ test question should be done. It's a sport and you get good at sports via drills until it become muscle memory.
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 a couple great companies on my resume because I ground these leetcode questions, but now that I’ve been working and in industry for 14 years… I don’t have the time to do the grind unless I’m explicitly looking for a job. The DS&A skills are still there, I use them and I’m glad I have them, but when someone reaches out to me to join their startup out of the blue and then hits me with the leetcode hard question that I haven’t seen in 8 years… well I’ve not passed those interviews. Usually I don’t say “ok, I’ll study for 4 weeks before the rounds” so I go in cold.
I never give these type of questions in my interviews of senior/staff+, I build out topical problems for the space I’m actually hiring for, then simplify it down to the interesting bits. I give a ramp, a simple problem, a more complex tweak to the simple problem that needs an interesting data structure (maybe needs a heap or similar) and then another tweak that forces them to abandon that data structure and do something novel. You can also fail this and still get hired.
With junior engineers, I’m sorry but I need something that looks like leetcode so I know you put the work in, and I can’t ask the topical questions because they have no frame of reference. These questions are like the common denominator for someone with no real world skills. I need to see that you’re driven and self motivated enough to teach yourself this (probably useless, when is the last time you had to implement merge sort) skill.
I also don’t think there is a great alternative. I put an extraordinary amount of work into making my questions that aren’t Leetcode, when they leak I’m heartbroken. I don’t want to just let a fancy school be the decision point, so I need to find a fair way to test. Asking people to do 1-2 days work or pair program… it’s usually caused a lot of dropping out of the funnel. So I would love to hear alternatives that are working for others
Leetcode can work well for junior / new grad candidates if you help & hint them a bit. For example they probably forgot breadth-first search, but if you give a couple hints about queues and they show tremendous swiftness, then that can be a good sign they’ll learn very quickly on the job. Does not prevent false negatives but reduces the FN rate and gives them what they really want (learning experience).
I did a lot of leetcode stuff this year. Dozens of interviews, no takers.
What got me a job was that I was a solo founder running a business and learning how to make the most of limited resources. Aka I was someone that gets things done and spends the least amount possible to get there. Use the resources you have and show you can create value.
Again, it all comes down to show don't tell.
Leetcode is valuable as a way to practice and maybe reaffirm skills. It's not useful for hiring in a direct way.
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 with the person for a couple of weeks. Ideally this happens on a paid contract basis. Of course our culture makes it more challenging to switch jobs if you want to work together first, but really no other interview process has ever provided good data.
At big companies HR and legal will say you need a reproducible, auditable, objective and defined interview process or you open yourself to a whole host of lawsuits, and you will get lawsuits because there is blood to squeeze from that lawsuit cow.
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.
In my experience, the results from those who claim they can judge skills based on a lunch conversation have not been good. I think people who can do it are the exception, not the norm.
If you are the type of person who writes a big brain log(n) solution instead of n solution when there is no real reason (compute wise) and the log(n) is a pain in the ass to maintain.
There is a lot to say about this. Due to technical limitations, the Leetcode site uses odd corner cases in their test suite to guide practitioners to specific, bespoke solutions. It's kind of insidious.
> People that never done LC problems probably don’t even know how to implement some data structures. So when they face a difficult problem they will probably just use a brute force approach.
You don't need leetcode for that. It's sufficient to talk about datastructures. In fact, that is a much better and actually reasonable thing to do in an in an interview.
> I also like these questions because you can ask them to any kind of software developer, from frontend to DevOps.
Only those that will apply at your place, which will exclude me if you require a leetcode interview. So, in fact, you will be biased by prefiltering candidates.
It's like when companies say "we only hire the top 1%" and I ask "the top 1% of all engineers or the top 1% of the engineers that chose to apply at your company?"
IMO the worst problem with leetcode challenges are the fact they are 100% in the training set of LLMs.
They solve them instantly, and making matters worse they are 100% valueless to a company.
What universe do we live in that hiring managers want staff that are 100% as skilled as an LLM but probably not as strong in areas that actually matter?
The reality everyone with a brain is going to cheat on these, they are typically pretty early in the interview process and it will hopefully get replaced with a real world test.
At my last job we just used example problems that we had seen in the past, usually REST API focused with just enough nuance to make engineers think through it and potentially refactor their code. Then you can ask them specifics of their thought process and get insight to their experience.
Coding assessments are definitely valuable in general. What isn't valuable are the class leetcode problems, where you have to use a heap, or DP, or some random useless data structure to solve a problem in O(n) instead of O(n log n) time. How about instead of asking a simple problem that has an obscure solution, ask a complicated problem with an obvious solution, but one that tests their software engineering skills. Make them ask clarifying questions about which of the many edge cases they are expected to handle, and verify which can be ignored. Add additional requirements that make refactoring necessary. Add constraints about the environment and ask how the candidate would handle that.
This opinion might be a bit controversial, so correct me if I am wrong.
Going by the Think Fast Think Slow, most of the people who were great at what they did, could be categorized overall, in terms of how they put in their effort, where they put in, and when they started from. (Apart from luck)
I think of this in terms of traits. Big tech companies, they would want to avoid any form of engineering silos, giving so much power to a single/single set of engineers, that would halt their business. Which is why they have this process.
They want a whole lot of easily replaceable engineers, who (might work on different projects), but overall have the same kind of mentality. This way they know, if the candidates have done what they need to do, and talked about things a certain way, they on a fundamental level would be the same.
So even if the person leaves, the style of work for the next incoming engineer wouldn't change, and everyone can go along with minimum friction.
Also, thinking a bit more, /^[FAANG]*/ companies would obviously try to cross-hire. Same as BIG4, same as /TCS,CTS,Infosys/ and likes.
A good chunk of people who work in MNC's stay in MNC's. Infact sometimes the projects are transferred from one MNC to the other, and then the manager or TL or whatever leading the project is hired first, and then he/she brings his/her team from the previous org.
Although end of the day, there will be a few hits and misses, but given the plethora of people working there, on a large scale of things, it doesn't really matter. I mean in a group of 20 people, 2 leaves. Its barely anything to make a dent.
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.
It's 2024, you can find tons of people with project experience AND who are good at LC. It's really saturated right now and it's very difficult to stand out.
>However, I usually trust my intuition quite a lot, and before giving it up I decided to find some strong arguments in favor of Leetcode (LC) interviews, and here they are.
> These interviews can identify candidates with strong problem-solving skills and logical reasoning abilities.
I would disagree with this premise. Leetcode identifies people who have just finished cramming for Leetcode questions. You don't need logical reasoning abilities to solve Leetcode, just encyclopedic knowledge of algorithms and data structures
They are good and I've had nothing but positive experiences through them.
In all the tech phone interviews that I've done in my life I have NEVER failed a LC/algorithm related interview.
My secret is to try to engage genuinely with the problem. And even when I haven't been able to solve a problem
I still would get passed to next round bcs I'd be on the right track.
I still don't know what ppl are complaining about. LC have a correct solution and a good interviewer will pass you
if you are on a good track. They are also relatively easy to prepare for. Now compare to actual BS which is the requirement
to have done work in a particular track that the company is hiring for.
Now that's total BS, I can't get 5 years in python in like 2 weeks before interview no matter how motivated I may be for the job.
There’s just so much guesswork with these as interview questions. The number of different problem spaces is non-trivial, and understanding the nature of the problem space for use in work is quite different from being able to work out a problem in 30 minutes in front of other people often in a code editor that is unfamiliar.
We lack an agreed upon, specific way to evaluate someone’s talent in 30-90 minutes. LC problems are not a terribly efficient way to fix this.
I think the article missed the biggest argument in favor leetcode style interviews - that they are quick and cheap to administer, and relatively unbiased/objective.
The reason big companies use these interview methods, is because they have to interview tens of thousands of candidates per year. None of the common alternative interview methods that get tossed around can scale to thousands of applicants.
This article was kind of lazy. It’s a lot of conjecture, a couple anecdotal observations, and some rhetoric for good measure. Basically, the content was a let down from the title. On the other hand, I didn’t know Data Scientist candidates would also be tested with LeetCode questions.
I feel like the author missed the most critical point: Leetcode style interviews are great at weeding out terrible coders (95% of applicants) early on in the hiring process, but don't carry an as strong signal for separating excellent candidates from the good ones.
Asking standard array/string manipulation/sorting etc questions in a 30min phone screen is very valuable to save your engineers 5hrs on a poor candidate. Conversely, throwing an NP hard leetcode hard at a senior dev with 20 years of experience and excellent culture fit with your organization in the 9th interview is basically meaningless.
Conversely, throwing an NP hard leetcode hard at a senior dev with 20 years of experience and excellent culture fit with your organization in the 9th interview is basically meaningless.
Worse than meaningless, it's a great way to toss away a diamond in the rough.
Leetcode problems skew towards competitive programming and grinders. They do absolutely nothing to show real-world programming skills which involve: 1) working within a large, existing codebase, 2) strong code documentation and commit message habits, 3) understanding of coding styles within the company culture so that you don't write in an unintelligible, bespoke style, and 4) communication skills and the ability to work within a team so that the candidate is not fighting strong headwinds.
> People don’t like LC interviews because they are bad at them,
I enjoy that this assertion is made with essentially no attempt to justify it, it's just said matter-of-factly as if it's just obvious truth. Well, let me speak at least for myself: Absolutely not.
[+] [-] waythenewsgoes|1 year ago|reply
LeetCode questions as interview questions are mostly theater. Most people who do well on these aren’t actually “solving them” on the fly from scratch. They just happen to have seen the exact same problem before and retake the steps they’ve memorized to get to the answer. Testing whether or not someone can regurgitate the solution they have memorized to a math problem doesn’t tell you much about how they will perform in a truly novel non-contrived constraint problem scenario, which is generally what most dev work entails.
Perhaps if you are working at Bespoke Algorithms ‘R Us, benchmarking this would have more value to your org, but for most dev roles at most companies it is hard to see it as more than a compliance exercise, or maybe even as a tool to weed out those with families that can’t devote the hours/day to LC memorization.
[+] [-] OnionBlender|1 year ago|reply
> 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 them before or it is a variation of a problem I've seen before.
[+] [-] GuB-42|1 year ago|reply
If the interview for a coding job doesn't involve actual coding, how do you know that the candidate can code? What you may get are people who are just really good at selling themselves. Maybe a good fit for the sales department, but not so much for the technical position you are hiring for.
LeetCode is not perfect, but no test is.
As for the "memorization" aspect. You can certainly memorize solutions. But you can't just memorize every character of every solution and regurgitate it perfectly. You will need to make some generalizations, just to fit everything into your brain, and as you type it back, you will probably misremember something, and have to fix the bug or bridge the gap. Those are useful, real life coding skills.
[+] [-] ipnon|1 year ago|reply
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
[+] [-] jongjong|1 year ago|reply
Creativity gets in the way of leetcode... Leetcode requires focus; you need to recall only the most relevant techniques for the problem, if you're being too creative and see too many possible solutions and you try to identify the most optimal one, it will slow you down and you will run out of time.
I tend to do better if the problems are more difficult with more time given. I'm built for solving difficult problems without hard time constraints. I'm bad at solving easy problems within limited time slots.
[+] [-] erik_seaberg|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] trh0awayman|1 year ago|reply
LeetCode was never about LeetCode, it was always a stand in for culture.
It's now a signal for baseline compliance. That's generally good for companies that require mostly operationalists.
The problem is that anyone can learn to leetcode. If you're interested in doing something new and not just warehousing CS lawyers, you're gonna have to ask better questions than that.
[+] [-] drewcoo|1 year ago|reply
I think the problem is that everyone thinks they can ask better questions and almost none of those people are qualified to judge their interviewing competency or have data to back themselves up. Every company has its own special interview techniques that it's convinced will lead to the best possible outcomes when those only demonstrably lead to the current staffing. To question any of that means pointing fingers at pretty much everyone and that's a political non-starter.
[+] [-] beaconify|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] habitue|1 year ago|reply
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 is measure some proxies. Leetcode is just a much better proxy than the old "how many ping-pong balls fit in a school bus" questions.
[+] [-] willio58|1 year ago|reply
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 of others in the class. I just do well when I can think alone, or when I can actually work toward a solution with a coworker.
I’ve made the companies I work for millions of dollars. But put me in front of a white board and ask me an algorithm question? You’d think I was fresh out of CS101.
[+] [-] novok|1 year ago|reply
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 invent the a leetcode solution from whole cloth if you treat it like an IQ test question should be done. It's a sport and you get good at sports via drills until it become muscle memory.
[+] [-] graymatters|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dilyevsky|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gedy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] slashdave|1 year ago|reply
What? No. You need to practice to be truly effective at Leetcode.
[+] [-] smarklefunf|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] MarkMarine|1 year ago|reply
I never give these type of questions in my interviews of senior/staff+, I build out topical problems for the space I’m actually hiring for, then simplify it down to the interesting bits. I give a ramp, a simple problem, a more complex tweak to the simple problem that needs an interesting data structure (maybe needs a heap or similar) and then another tweak that forces them to abandon that data structure and do something novel. You can also fail this and still get hired.
With junior engineers, I’m sorry but I need something that looks like leetcode so I know you put the work in, and I can’t ask the topical questions because they have no frame of reference. These questions are like the common denominator for someone with no real world skills. I need to see that you’re driven and self motivated enough to teach yourself this (probably useless, when is the last time you had to implement merge sort) skill.
I also don’t think there is a great alternative. I put an extraordinary amount of work into making my questions that aren’t Leetcode, when they leak I’m heartbroken. I don’t want to just let a fancy school be the decision point, so I need to find a fair way to test. Asking people to do 1-2 days work or pair program… it’s usually caused a lot of dropping out of the funnel. So I would love to hear alternatives that are working for others
[+] [-] choppaface|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] geuis|1 year ago|reply
What got me a job was that I was a solo founder running a business and learning how to make the most of limited resources. Aka I was someone that gets things done and spends the least amount possible to get there. Use the resources you have and show you can create value.
Again, it all comes down to show don't tell.
Leetcode is valuable as a way to practice and maybe reaffirm skills. It's not useful for hiring in a direct way.
[+] [-] danjl|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] novok|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] alisey|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] eadwu|1 year ago|reply
I hope I never see you in my team.
[+] [-] slashdave|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] beaconify|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] valenterry|1 year ago|reply
You don't need leetcode for that. It's sufficient to talk about datastructures. In fact, that is a much better and actually reasonable thing to do in an in an interview.
> I also like these questions because you can ask them to any kind of software developer, from frontend to DevOps.
Only those that will apply at your place, which will exclude me if you require a leetcode interview. So, in fact, you will be biased by prefiltering candidates.
It's like when companies say "we only hire the top 1%" and I ask "the top 1% of all engineers or the top 1% of the engineers that chose to apply at your company?"
[+] [-] bearjaws|1 year ago|reply
They solve them instantly, and making matters worse they are 100% valueless to a company.
What universe do we live in that hiring managers want staff that are 100% as skilled as an LLM but probably not as strong in areas that actually matter?
The reality everyone with a brain is going to cheat on these, they are typically pretty early in the interview process and it will hopefully get replaced with a real world test.
At my last job we just used example problems that we had seen in the past, usually REST API focused with just enough nuance to make engineers think through it and potentially refactor their code. Then you can ask them specifics of their thought process and get insight to their experience.
[+] [-] hatthew|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] argentum47|1 year ago|reply
Going by the Think Fast Think Slow, most of the people who were great at what they did, could be categorized overall, in terms of how they put in their effort, where they put in, and when they started from. (Apart from luck)
I think of this in terms of traits. Big tech companies, they would want to avoid any form of engineering silos, giving so much power to a single/single set of engineers, that would halt their business. Which is why they have this process.
They want a whole lot of easily replaceable engineers, who (might work on different projects), but overall have the same kind of mentality. This way they know, if the candidates have done what they need to do, and talked about things a certain way, they on a fundamental level would be the same. So even if the person leaves, the style of work for the next incoming engineer wouldn't change, and everyone can go along with minimum friction.
Also, thinking a bit more, /^[FAANG]*/ companies would obviously try to cross-hire. Same as BIG4, same as /TCS,CTS,Infosys/ and likes. A good chunk of people who work in MNC's stay in MNC's. Infact sometimes the projects are transferred from one MNC to the other, and then the manager or TL or whatever leading the project is hired first, and then he/she brings his/her team from the previous org.
Although end of the day, there will be a few hits and misses, but given the plethora of people working there, on a large scale of things, it doesn't really matter. I mean in a group of 20 people, 2 leaves. Its barely anything to make a dent.
[+] [-] joshdavham|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] coolThingsFirst|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 000ooo000|1 year ago|reply
Sounds like confirmation bias to me..
[+] [-] dherls|1 year ago|reply
I would disagree with this premise. Leetcode identifies people who have just finished cramming for Leetcode questions. You don't need logical reasoning abilities to solve Leetcode, just encyclopedic knowledge of algorithms and data structures
[+] [-] coolThingsFirst|1 year ago|reply
In all the tech phone interviews that I've done in my life I have NEVER failed a LC/algorithm related interview. My secret is to try to engage genuinely with the problem. And even when I haven't been able to solve a problem I still would get passed to next round bcs I'd be on the right track.
I still don't know what ppl are complaining about. LC have a correct solution and a good interviewer will pass you if you are on a good track. They are also relatively easy to prepare for. Now compare to actual BS which is the requirement to have done work in a particular track that the company is hiring for.
Now that's total BS, I can't get 5 years in python in like 2 weeks before interview no matter how motivated I may be for the job.
[+] [-] chrisbrandow|1 year ago|reply
We lack an agreed upon, specific way to evaluate someone’s talent in 30-90 minutes. LC problems are not a terribly efficient way to fix this.
[+] [-] MichaelNolan|1 year ago|reply
The reason big companies use these interview methods, is because they have to interview tens of thousands of candidates per year. None of the common alternative interview methods that get tossed around can scale to thousands of applicants.
[+] [-] etse|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cherryteastain|1 year ago|reply
Asking standard array/string manipulation/sorting etc questions in a 30min phone screen is very valuable to save your engineers 5hrs on a poor candidate. Conversely, throwing an NP hard leetcode hard at a senior dev with 20 years of experience and excellent culture fit with your organization in the 9th interview is basically meaningless.
[+] [-] chongli|1 year ago|reply
Worse than meaningless, it's a great way to toss away a diamond in the rough.
Leetcode problems skew towards competitive programming and grinders. They do absolutely nothing to show real-world programming skills which involve: 1) working within a large, existing codebase, 2) strong code documentation and commit message habits, 3) understanding of coding styles within the company culture so that you don't write in an unintelligible, bespoke style, and 4) communication skills and the ability to work within a team so that the candidate is not fighting strong headwinds.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jchw|1 year ago|reply
I enjoy that this assertion is made with essentially no attempt to justify it, it's just said matter-of-factly as if it's just obvious truth. Well, let me speak at least for myself: Absolutely not.