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A lot of the companies I've seen actually hiring these days are doing more legit work-sample problems than Leetcode tasks. Coinbase and Stripe both have progra
by nostrademons 7y ago
A lot of the companies I've seen actually hiring these days are doing more legit work-sample problems than Leetcode tasks.
Coinbase and Stripe both have programming tasks that are clearly condensed versions of the actual work you'll be doing there. Google does too if you get a good interviewer, though it can vary a lot between interviewers. Snap, Lyft, and Facebook were all leetcode exercises - but they're ones that have been hurting more from the coronavirus recession.
Leetcode is popular now because there're a bunch of tools (CoderPad/Karat for interviews and Leetcode/HackerRank for practice) that make it easy. I'm already seeing the pendulum start to swing the other way though - many of the best companies are building hiring processes tailored to their own business because they get a competitive advantage from doing so, both because they get more signal on prospective applicants and because it means interviewing does not become a transferrable skill that you can use to get multiple competing offers.
- decafninja 7y agoI've encountered takehome problems more often these days, but they've always been in addition to leetcode interviews, not instead of. As one example, a "mid-tier" company gave me homework to do, which I spent a lot of time and effort to do a good job. The team apparently was impressed - supposedly I had one of the best solutions, and I got to the onsite. Then the onsite had two leetcode rounds, one of which I struggled with. I got rejected. I don't know the exact reasons of course, but considering I felt the rest of the interview seemed to go great, I suspect it's the leetcode problem I failed to get the superoptimal solutino for that killed me. Nowadays my policy is to just reject any company that gives me homework to do as part of their interview loop. More often than not it's a waste of time. The exception would be companies like FAANG or other "top" companies. I'd definitely still do homework for Coinbase or Stripe. Some company I've never heard of or some non-tech company? Nope. At least studying leetcode scales horizontally across many companies.
- dominotw 7y agoI ask leetcode round to be before homework. I don't do it if its other way.
- esoterica 7y agoThe problem with realistic work-sample problems is that most of the difficulty in real life programming comes from complexity which cannot be replicated in a 1 hour technical interview. You can't really test someone on their ability to add a feature to a 10 million line code base that interacts with 50 different other modules in an interview setting. A 1 hour technical interview is going be either realistic but trivial and useless for differentiating candidates, or difficult through contrived means (like leetcode).
- dominotw 7y ago> Coinbase and Stripe I got asked leetcode in stripe interview.
- nostrademons 7y agoHow long ago? I interviewed 2 days ago and everything was work-sample. It sounded like this was a recent (last couple months) change; one of my interviewers had never given the particular problem before. (Similarly, the Coinbase interviewer said that if I had interviewed a year ago it would've been leetcode but they've redone their process significantly since.)
- decafninja 7y agoIs it -all- work sample based? Or does leetcode come into the picture somewhere? (BTW, does that mean homework? Just want to clarify. Something like "build this feature or write a function that does this" kind of thing?) How about the on-site? What do they make you do there?