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It doesn't matter whether it's hard or not, it's at best a mediocre tool to determine programming skills. Also, it leads to a spiral of becoming worse: 1. bein

It doesn't matter whether it's hard or not, it's at best a mediocre tool to determine programming skills. Also, it leads to a spiral of becoming worse: 1. being able to solve LeetCode tasks doesn't mean you're a good developer 2. not being able to solve these tasks doesn't mean you're a bad developer. So we have a tool that has a certain (IMHO high) rate of false positives and false negatives. 3. people start realising that LeetCode is becoming a go-to tool for recruiters, so instead of studying to become better developers, they study to become better at solving LC exercises, which increases the rate of false positives 4. with developers becoming better at LC, the bar is set higher and higher (because people spend time learning LC), so people who do not study LC exercises become far behind those who do, which also increases rate of false negatives 5. repeat points 3. and 4. until mastering LC exercises becomes more important than being a good engineer This is a ridiculous trend which in my opinion only emphasises how screwed up is hiring in our industry.

matz1 7y ago
These are more of the problem for the employer.
- rightbyte 7y ago
  And the interview victims wasting there time. And the employees that don't get new coworkers becouse riddles.
  - matz1 7y ago
    Wasting time ? You should do some research before going job searching, by now you should know about this leetcode thing.
    - Bootvis 7y ago
      Wasting time on training a skill they are not realistically going to benefit from. People can only spend their time once so learning other skills will suffer. If the job requires algorithm wizardry, I see the benefits of LeetCode-style interviews but many jobs are not like that.
      - matz1 7y ago
        The first and foremost purpose of practicing let code is to get the job, thats the benefit. You do it in addition of learning skills you use on your job.
        Bootvis 7y ago
        Yes, and this wastes time compared to the situation where there is no useless use of leetcode-like tests.
        matz1 7y ago
        Company use leetcode style because is not useless. it make the interview process more streamlined, scalable and predictable. For the me interviewee, it also make the interview process more streamlined, scalable and predictable. I practice once and I can use it for many other company, thus save my time.
        Bootvis 7y ago
        There is no point in streamlining or scaling a process that leads to wrong outcomes. At the margin, companies will lose out on qualified candidates that have better things to do with their time than practice algorithms and hire unqualified candidates that got lucky with their Leetcode practice.
- chillacy 7y ago
  I think it's instructive to consider who the employer is too. Leetcode works well for Google. They pay top notch compensation and have a long line of people who want to work there. They can put horrible hoops up and enough people would still want to jump through them. Most companies have cargo-culted the programming interview, even when they don't have the same amount of demand from candidates.
rjf72 7y ago
You have to consider the perspective of a company or a recruiter. Their goal is not to simply find somebody who is capable, it's to take the hundreds if not thousands of prospective applicants they have and then cull that down to the tiny handful that they advance along for the openings that they have available. You're not looking for reasons to accept people, but for reasons to reject them. It's just the nature of employing for positions when with a large pool of interested and qualified labor. Should movements such as 'get [anybody with a pulse] into coding' succeed, you can expect to see an ever increasing absurdity in requirements. The reason is not to try to be elite or whatever, but because the reality is you have to get rid of of > 90% of applications, for larger companies it may be > 99%. And so as the number of applications increases, you get an ever larger quantity of people with at least the minimum requirements and so you are forced to be increasingly selective. Does passing some leetcode task mean you're a good developer? No, of course not. But if you take 100 passable developers and you're looking for the best, are they more or less likely than average to be able to pass such a test? It's the same reason that even though a college degree has absolutely 0 relevance to serving coffee, you're increasingly seeing companies "preferring" college degrees for their barely above minimum wage baristas. [1] If you take 100 potential baristas is that best of the best of those 100 more or less likely to have a college degree? Even though it has nothing to do with the actual job, it's just a decent way to filter 100 down to 1. [1] - https://www.inc.com/suzanne-lucas/why-that-barista-has-a-college-degree-grade-inflation.html https://www.inc.com/suzanne-lucas/why-that-barista-has-a-col...
- mgoblu3 7y ago
  I feel this perspective gets lost a bit. Big companies don't roll through 1000 applications with 50 open spots and try to hire the best 50 candidates. They want to find maybe people in the top quartile of that, while spending the minimal amount of time on costs to find the adequate fits, and the cost of a false positive is way higher than the cost of a false negative. Is the process great? Absolutely not, and I'm sure that these places miss out on qualified candidates because of the process and hire some people who gamed the process. Things like degrees and LeetCode tests and other screening methods are just ways to reduce cost and risk to get that "good enough" threshold.
avgDev 7y ago
Honestly, I pass on companies that do leetcode, I'm simply not going to do it. In my day to day I am working on mission critical applications, creating web applications that rely on legacy databases, writing SQL SPs. I'm decent considering my short career, i try to improve on every previous project. However, when I go home I'm not wasting my time grinding leetcode, even though I was top of every class in college, algorithms, data structures, theory of computation and so on. I'm competent and pick up new stuff very easily. I tell recruiters I will pass on an interview if they are doing leetcode/hackerrank. I'm okay to solve some coding problems that they have day to day, talk about architecture/design, talk about what I'm good at and where I want to improve. I also wish other people would stop grinding leetcode and that everyone was realistic about the job at hand. Most developers won't be writing the most efficient code, but start easy and refactor if certain part of the application becomes a bottleneck.
ThrowawayR2 7y ago
> 2. not being able to solve these tasks doesn't mean you're a bad developer. Half of those questions are based on sophomore-level data structures and algorithms classes, the same concepts that operating systems, compilers, and most libraries/frameworks are based on. I would certainly hope that an experienced developer could effortlessly relearn basic concepts taught to college sophomores long enough to pass an interview.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

matz1 7y ago

These are more of the problem for the employer.

rightbyte 7y ago
And the interview victims wasting there time. And the employees that don't get new coworkers becouse riddles.
- matz1 7y ago
  Wasting time ? You should do some research before going job searching, by now you should know about this leetcode thing.
  - Bootvis 7y ago
    Wasting time on training a skill they are not realistically going to benefit from. People can only spend their time once so learning other skills will suffer. If the job requires algorithm wizardry, I see the benefits of LeetCode-style interviews but many jobs are not like that.
    - matz1 7y ago
      The first and foremost purpose of practicing let code is to get the job, thats the benefit. You do it in addition of learning skills you use on your job.
      - Bootvis 7y ago
        Yes, and this wastes time compared to the situation where there is no useless use of leetcode-like tests.
        matz1 7y ago
        Company use leetcode style because is not useless. it make the interview process more streamlined, scalable and predictable. For the me interviewee, it also make the interview process more streamlined, scalable and predictable. I practice once and I can use it for many other company, thus save my time.
        Bootvis 7y ago
        There is no point in streamlining or scaling a process that leads to wrong outcomes. At the margin, companies will lose out on qualified candidates that have better things to do with their time than practice algorithms and hire unqualified candidates that got lucky with their Leetcode practice.
chillacy 7y ago
I think it's instructive to consider who the employer is too. Leetcode works well for Google. They pay top notch compensation and have a long line of people who want to work there. They can put horrible hoops up and enough people would still want to jump through them. Most companies have cargo-culted the programming interview, even when they don't have the same amount of demand from candidates.

rjf72 7y ago

You have to consider the perspective of a company or a recruiter. Their goal is not to simply find somebody who is capable, it's to take the hundreds if not thousands of prospective applicants they have and then cull that down to the tiny handful that they advance along for the openings that they have available. You're not looking for reasons to accept people, but for reasons to reject them. It's just the nature of employing for positions when with a large pool of interested and qualified labor. Should movements such as 'get [anybody with a pulse] into coding' succeed, you can expect to see an ever increasing absurdity in requirements. The reason is not to try to be elite or whatever, but because the reality is you have to get rid of of > 90% of applications, for larger companies it may be > 99%. And so as the number of applications increases, you get an ever larger quantity of people with at least the minimum requirements and so you are forced to be increasingly selective. Does passing some leetcode task mean you're a good developer? No, of course not. But if you take 100 passable developers and you're looking for the best, are they more or less likely than average to be able to pass such a test? It's the same reason that even though a college degree has absolutely 0 relevance to serving coffee, you're increasingly seeing companies "preferring" college degrees for their barely above minimum wage baristas. [1] If you take 100 potential baristas is that best of the best of those 100 more or less likely to have a college degree? Even though it has nothing to do with the actual job, it's just a decent way to filter 100 down to 1. [1] - https://www.inc.com/suzanne-lucas/why-that-barista-has-a-college-degree-grade-inflation.html https://www.inc.com/suzanne-lucas/why-that-barista-has-a-col...

mgoblu3 7y ago
I feel this perspective gets lost a bit. Big companies don't roll through 1000 applications with 50 open spots and try to hire the best 50 candidates. They want to find maybe people in the top quartile of that, while spending the minimal amount of time on costs to find the adequate fits, and the cost of a false positive is way higher than the cost of a false negative. Is the process great? Absolutely not, and I'm sure that these places miss out on qualified candidates because of the process and hire some people who gamed the process. Things like degrees and LeetCode tests and other screening methods are just ways to reduce cost and risk to get that "good enough" threshold.

avgDev 7y ago

Honestly, I pass on companies that do leetcode, I'm simply not going to do it. In my day to day I am working on mission critical applications, creating web applications that rely on legacy databases, writing SQL SPs. I'm decent considering my short career, i try to improve on every previous project. However, when I go home I'm not wasting my time grinding leetcode, even though I was top of every class in college, algorithms, data structures, theory of computation and so on. I'm competent and pick up new stuff very easily. I tell recruiters I will pass on an interview if they are doing leetcode/hackerrank. I'm okay to solve some coding problems that they have day to day, talk about architecture/design, talk about what I'm good at and where I want to improve. I also wish other people would stop grinding leetcode and that everyone was realistic about the job at hand. Most developers won't be writing the most efficient code, but start easy and refactor if certain part of the application becomes a bottleneck.

ThrowawayR2 7y ago

> 2. not being able to solve these tasks doesn't mean you're a bad developer. Half of those questions are based on sophomore-level data structures and algorithms classes, the same concepts that operating systems, compilers, and most libraries/frameworks are based on. I would certainly hope that an experienced developer could effortlessly relearn basic concepts taught to college sophomores long enough to pass an interview.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]