3 ms·

As a web developer who works almost exclusively in PHP/SQL and devops, if I was presented with a "Leetcode" challenge or any other intentionally esoteric / pure

As a web developer who works almost exclusively in PHP/SQL and devops, if I was presented with a "Leetcode" challenge or any other intentionally esoteric / purely theoretical bullshit interview technique I would immediately but politely excuse myself from the process. That nonsense is utterly non-representative of what the average programmer will be doing on a daily basis. Even Leetcode's most "easy" problem just seems utterly ridiculous to me: https://leetcode.com/problems/two-sum/ https://leetcode.com/problems/two-sum/ What next? "Vim golf" scores in interviews?

dragonwriter 5y ago
> Even Leetcode's most "easy" problem just seems utterly ridiculous to me Generalized slightly from the specifics, “return the indexes of the elements, one from each list, constituting a tuple satisfying a predicate” is not an utterly ridiculous task unrepresentative of things real programmers need to understand how to do. Yeah, usually it won't be lists of integers or the sun operation returning a particular value as the predicate, but none of that is particularly significant to the task.
- engineerDave 5y ago
  The problem as I've experienced it is they hire you based on the code example from the interview and then the actual job requires you to know all the orchestration components (puppet, chef, kubernetes, package manager and system settings, etc) to bootstrap the virtual machine OS or cloud component that then will require you to know the particular OS distro CLI or cloud API to then run the code upon. In my experience, I spend 80% of my time just figuring out how to get the code to run safely and properly and then chugging through the "stack" part of the full stack programmer before I'm even able to run my code at scale. The actual code itself tends to be simple. Sometimes already existing in a very fleshed out and optimized library, sometimes even core to the language itself. It's really more endemic of more the prevalent problem that what HR thinks programming tends to not be what programmers actually do.
therealdavesky 5y ago
I don’t remember the problems Google asked me to solve, there were 5 of them during a daylong interview in Mountain View. WRT Facebook, the problems were a schedule organizer (iOS) and a contact tracer (iOS). The FB second problem was a NSRange intersection problem. I agree that leetcode-esque problems used to decide aptitude are a poor judge of overall performance, and it may show a bit of desperation (and slacker behavior) coming from the HR departments of MANGA companies
globular-toast 5y ago
You think finding two numbers in an array is ridiculous? How do you think software like the OS, web browser etc. is made? Someone has to do stuff like this...
- wackget 5y ago
  Yeah I totally get it. It's just not nearly as relevant for my industry (web dev) as it is for actual rocket science, for example.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> Even Leetcode's most "easy" problem just seems utterly ridiculous to me Generalized slightly from the specifics, “return the indexes of the elements, one from each list, constituting a tuple satisfying a predicate” is not an utterly ridiculous task unrepresentative of things real programmers need to understand how to do. Yeah, usually it won't be lists of integers or the sun operation returning a particular value as the predicate, but none of that is particularly significant to the task.

engineerDave 5y ago
The problem as I've experienced it is they hire you based on the code example from the interview and then the actual job requires you to know all the orchestration components (puppet, chef, kubernetes, package manager and system settings, etc) to bootstrap the virtual machine OS or cloud component that then will require you to know the particular OS distro CLI or cloud API to then run the code upon. In my experience, I spend 80% of my time just figuring out how to get the code to run safely and properly and then chugging through the "stack" part of the full stack programmer before I'm even able to run my code at scale. The actual code itself tends to be simple. Sometimes already existing in a very fleshed out and optimized library, sometimes even core to the language itself. It's really more endemic of more the prevalent problem that what HR thinks programming tends to not be what programmers actually do.

therealdavesky 5y ago

I don’t remember the problems Google asked me to solve, there were 5 of them during a daylong interview in Mountain View. WRT Facebook, the problems were a schedule organizer (iOS) and a contact tracer (iOS). The FB second problem was a NSRange intersection problem. I agree that leetcode-esque problems used to decide aptitude are a poor judge of overall performance, and it may show a bit of desperation (and slacker behavior) coming from the HR departments of MANGA companies

globular-toast 5y ago

You think finding two numbers in an array is ridiculous? How do you think software like the OS, web browser etc. is made? Someone has to do stuff like this...

wackget 5y ago
Yeah I totally get it. It's just not nearly as relevant for my industry (web dev) as it is for actual rocket science, for example.