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I don't consider myself particularly talented, but it's really not that much time to practice. At 10+ years of experience, I spent maybe up to 40 hours of prac

I don't consider myself particularly talented, but it's really not that much time to practice. At 10+ years of experience, I spent maybe up to 40 hours of practice the last couple of times I switched to interviewing mode. Pretty easy to spread out over 2 weeks to a month to get in shape. I don't consider that an unreasonable or unacceptable burden.

MillenialMan 5y ago
It's not that it's unreasonable, it's that it's a bad criteria because it's so easy. In 40 hours, a college graduate can get to the point where they're outdoing, say, one of the principal architects of AlphaGo? Then that selection criteria sucks. In any other situation we avoid metrics that are easy to game. The argument that it selects for industriousness strikes me as a cope. It might, but it's also so easy to game that it obscures actual ability (unless you're just using it as a filter). Is that trade-off really worth it?
- jmchuster 5y ago
  So, i was responding to your comment: > I would have thought most talented programmers don't want to waste their time on leetcode, so it would primarily select for people who can't succeed without dedicating time to it. I was saying that it's not that much of a waste of time, because it's not that much of a time investment for a good outcome (doing well at interviews). If you want to change the argument from "it's a waste of time" to "it's trivially easy and easy to game", then why are there people who complain about leetcode and not wanting to do it?
  - MillenialMan 5y ago
    It is both a waste of time and easy to game. The reason it's a waste of time is that it's easy to game, so some of your rivals will be gaming it. Which means you have to do it too, so it just becomes a dumb tax you pay every time you interview for a new job. That's all from the individual candidate's perspective, of course. From the employer's perspective, you're still only going to have a minority of your interviewees having prepared their cheat codes. So you're evaluating based on ability to prepare a cheat code. Which IMO is retarded. If there wasn't a site dedicated to preparing cheat codes (which is how it used to be), then it would be sensible.
    - jmchuster 5y ago
      Hmm, i think your understanding of the state of things is slightly backwards. Because Google is so large, interviews so many people, has such a strong brand name, and pays so much more than everyone else, their interview process is going to be a very well-known quantity. Therefore, the questions that they used to use all were being gamed, so they kept on adjusting and tweaking and upping the difficulty, until they ended up with where they are now. So the point is, how do you interview if you know that everyone is going to know all the questions ahead of time? Seems like google's solution is they'll just make their questions difficult leetcode level. So, then their thinking is, sure if you're able to grind leetcode to a point that you can pass our interviews, then we'll be perfectly happy to hire you. So you've "cheated" the system by learning how to program a wide variety of difficult algorithm-heavy programs. Worst case scenario, your resume is a complete sham, but at least you're able to write the code that they're hiring you to write, and everything else that you're lacking, well, they'll be indoctrinating you in the google way anyways, so they don't care about your past experience.
      - MillenialMan 5y ago
        That doesn't sound like an effective pipeline to me. That sounds like a really bad pipeline, and a lot of post-hoc justifications to minimise the issues. I'm hesitant to take Google's use of a tool as an indication that the tool is good, or that the process is refined. They used brain teasers for years before figuring out they had zero predictive power. Ignoring the implications of the scale of that mistake, one thing it indicates is that they aren't able to effectively evaluate different interviewing methods.
        jmchuster 5y ago
        If they had no ability to effectively evaluate, how did they conclude that brain teasers had no predictive power? I see google's process along the same lines as "democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried". Now ideally, what you'd want is to be able to perfectly read someone's mind and someone's intention, to be able to tell instantly their strengths and weaknesses, to be able to tell which of those weaknesses are trivial ones that will get smoothed over a week into the job, and which of those are ones that are actually long-term issues that will poison your organization. It's possible that individuals with such judgement exist (Paul Graham has said that YC's success was attributed to Jessica's ability to judge founders) and that they work at google. But now you also need a process that can interview and evaluate a thousand people every single week. So what works for small companies where you can agonize over every hire or for exec searches, doesn't make as much sense for mass hiring of peons. So given those constraints, everyone knows your process, everyone wants to apply, you need to interview a thousand people a week and decide to hire a hundred of them, and they really don't all need to be rockstar founder quality, but they all need to be able to produce something, you can start to imagine what type of interview process you might end up with.

MillenialMan 5y ago

It's not that it's unreasonable, it's that it's a bad criteria because it's so easy. In 40 hours, a college graduate can get to the point where they're outdoing, say, one of the principal architects of AlphaGo? Then that selection criteria sucks. In any other situation we avoid metrics that are easy to game. The argument that it selects for industriousness strikes me as a cope. It might, but it's also so easy to game that it obscures actual ability (unless you're just using it as a filter). Is that trade-off really worth it?

jmchuster 5y ago
So, i was responding to your comment: > I would have thought most talented programmers don't want to waste their time on leetcode, so it would primarily select for people who can't succeed without dedicating time to it. I was saying that it's not that much of a waste of time, because it's not that much of a time investment for a good outcome (doing well at interviews). If you want to change the argument from "it's a waste of time" to "it's trivially easy and easy to game", then why are there people who complain about leetcode and not wanting to do it?
- MillenialMan 5y ago
  It is both a waste of time and easy to game. The reason it's a waste of time is that it's easy to game, so some of your rivals will be gaming it. Which means you have to do it too, so it just becomes a dumb tax you pay every time you interview for a new job. That's all from the individual candidate's perspective, of course. From the employer's perspective, you're still only going to have a minority of your interviewees having prepared their cheat codes. So you're evaluating based on ability to prepare a cheat code. Which IMO is retarded. If there wasn't a site dedicated to preparing cheat codes (which is how it used to be), then it would be sensible.
  - jmchuster 5y ago
    Hmm, i think your understanding of the state of things is slightly backwards. Because Google is so large, interviews so many people, has such a strong brand name, and pays so much more than everyone else, their interview process is going to be a very well-known quantity. Therefore, the questions that they used to use all were being gamed, so they kept on adjusting and tweaking and upping the difficulty, until they ended up with where they are now. So the point is, how do you interview if you know that everyone is going to know all the questions ahead of time? Seems like google's solution is they'll just make their questions difficult leetcode level. So, then their thinking is, sure if you're able to grind leetcode to a point that you can pass our interviews, then we'll be perfectly happy to hire you. So you've "cheated" the system by learning how to program a wide variety of difficult algorithm-heavy programs. Worst case scenario, your resume is a complete sham, but at least you're able to write the code that they're hiring you to write, and everything else that you're lacking, well, they'll be indoctrinating you in the google way anyways, so they don't care about your past experience.
    - MillenialMan 5y ago
      That doesn't sound like an effective pipeline to me. That sounds like a really bad pipeline, and a lot of post-hoc justifications to minimise the issues. I'm hesitant to take Google's use of a tool as an indication that the tool is good, or that the process is refined. They used brain teasers for years before figuring out they had zero predictive power. Ignoring the implications of the scale of that mistake, one thing it indicates is that they aren't able to effectively evaluate different interviewing methods.
      - jmchuster 5y ago
        If they had no ability to effectively evaluate, how did they conclude that brain teasers had no predictive power? I see google's process along the same lines as "democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried". Now ideally, what you'd want is to be able to perfectly read someone's mind and someone's intention, to be able to tell instantly their strengths and weaknesses, to be able to tell which of those weaknesses are trivial ones that will get smoothed over a week into the job, and which of those are ones that are actually long-term issues that will poison your organization. It's possible that individuals with such judgement exist (Paul Graham has said that YC's success was attributed to Jessica's ability to judge founders) and that they work at google. But now you also need a process that can interview and evaluate a thousand people every single week. So what works for small companies where you can agonize over every hire or for exec searches, doesn't make as much sense for mass hiring of peons. So given those constraints, everyone knows your process, everyone wants to apply, you need to interview a thousand people a week and decide to hire a hundred of them, and they really don't all need to be rockstar founder quality, but they all need to be able to produce something, you can start to imagine what type of interview process you might end up with.