20 ms·

I believe leetcode is a way to skirt around discriminatory hiring practices. It’s not at all representative of most work environments. Some want to pretend they

by cebert 5y ago

I believe leetcode is a way to skirt around discriminatory hiring practices. It’s not at all representative of most work environments. Some want to pretend they’re cognitive wizards, but many of the algorithms used to solve problems took years to develop. If you haven’t seen a particular problem before or had time to research it, it’s unrealistic to expect a candidate to solve it in twenty minutes in a high pressure situation. This process benefits individuals who have the luxury of time to spend preping. Something minorities, working parents, etc. don’t have. I’ve been a software engineer and now architect for 15 years. Studying leetcode like problems won’t help me at my current job or a future employer once I get past their interview processes. What leetcode does do is make it difficult for minority candidates, those with external obligations, or those with families to get into firms. For example, I work 50+ hours a week with two kids and a parent with cancer. I work hard at work and have a lot of external obligations. I don’t have time or to study leecode problems.

yobbo 5y ago
> skirt around discriminatory hiring practices Yes, maybe we should consider leetcode interview as something of a rorschach-blotch. The interviewer can take the discussion in any direction he wants, under the pretence of "evaluating technical competence" or whatever.
chrismcb 5y ago
This is kind of like saying requiring a bachelor's degree is a way to skirt around discriminatory hiring practices. Ignoring your racists and offensive remarks, getting a job does require studying and prepping, whether you simply study the fundamentals or leetcode.
rightbyte 5y ago
> minority candidates I guess 'poor [edit: low on money] candidates' would be more precise.
- cebert 5y ago
  How does having ample time to prep for leetcode like problems make you a better candidate exactly?
  - quanto 5y ago
    I think GP meant 'poor' as in poverty. It goes with your examples of economic hardship and not having the free time for leetcodes. My charitably interpreting 2c, anyway.
    - rightbyte 5y ago
      Oh ye. I didn't think you could interpret what I wrote as "poor [quality] candidates".
  - marcellus23 5y ago
    I’m not him but I read his comment as simply taking issue with the idea that it’s minorities in particular who don’t have time for that, rather than simply poor people. (The terms are not interchangeable, since there are many wealthy people who are members of a minority, and there are many poor white people)
    - rightbyte 5y ago
      Yes thank you. Sometimes you should just write out things explicitly ...
  - rerx 5y ago
    Financially poor
  - ivanbakel 5y ago
    I think the GP likely meant "poor" in the sense of "destitute", not "poor-quality".
- Madmallard 5y ago
  I don't remotely understand how. You literally can get good at leetcode with an hour a day for a couple of months provided you studied computer science or even just like took AP Computer Science in high school. And even that just requires an internet connection.
  - canyonero 5y ago
    How do you not understand that many people with families or other external obligations wouldn’t have the luxury of spending 7 hours a week for multiple months on leetcode?
    - fault1 5y ago
      Like everything else, it's an opportunity cost. Personally, I think LC is a great return on time invested. It takes far less time and money than say, any of the traditional gatekeepers, even for example a CS degree, or even perhaps a good data structures and algorithms class that is semester long.
    - Madmallard 5y ago
      If they need to spend that level of time in order to do a few search or sort problems on a whiteboard I'd be concerned that they don't actually know algorithms or datastructures. The kinds of questions most companies ask are not hard.
  - nopenopenopeno 5y ago
    I am 35 years old and never even heard if a high school computer science course. I spent one period of my last semester assisting the network admin with maintenance tasks, which was the closest thing we had to AP computer anything, and only 2 students in my class had the privilege.
qwytw 5y ago
Ignoring whether leetcode itself is useful or not. Do you believe it's inherently unfair to discriminate in favour of people who dedicated more time to e.g. studying CS theory, contributing to open source projects, working on hobby projects, earning advanced degrees etc. ? All of those things require time and money (in opportunity costs).
- cebert 5y ago
  No, I think those are great ways to stand out and demonstrate interest and side projects and degrees are more representative of actual work. Leetcode itself though seems to be used as a gatekeeper benefiting those with the luxury of time to do the grind. It doesn’t mean you’re necessarily getting more qualified candidates and are possibly excluding some folks who would be more than capable.
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    Finding people with too much free time is the entire point of leetcode. Companies want employees who will dedicate their life to their work. If you don't have time to grind leetcode employers feel that you won't have time to work 60 hours a week and spend your free time thinking about work.
    - giraffe_lady 5y ago
      I think it's more common that people just have the unexamined assumption that programming skill is more of a natural talent than it is, and also that these tools are an effective way to test for that talent. I'm sure what you're talking about happens too, but I've seen the other thing first hand a couple times so I know it can be less malicious than that.
    - Tyr42 5y ago
      I think people have over updated on spending free time on leetcode is the only way to solve these problems, but as a undergrad doing internship interviews, the problems weren't that hard? Has it gotten worse in the last 5 years?
Dave3of5 5y ago
Yeah I agree I'm similar to you in that I'm a parent with 2 kids 16 years exp and these leetcode tests kick my butt. The companies making you do this though likely don't want someone like me. They want someone young who will burn themselves out working 80 hours a week for them. So I guess it's a good filter for me as well.
- pawelmurias 5y ago
  Almost nobody would stay productive coding 80 hours per week.
  - danlugo92 5y ago
    Almost nobody is productive past the 30 hours a week stage (excl meetings and lunch hour and whatnot).
- squidlogic 5y ago
  I'm doing the hiring for a small company. We do coding tests as part of our interview process. I know it can show false negatives but it rarely shows false positives (wrt coding ability). However, we don't ask employees to work anything like 80 hours a week. In fact, we track overtime hours (> 40hrs/wk) and pull the red "panic" lever when it goes above a threshold as a control for burnout. But like you said, you're applying a filter too (if no coding test -> low overtime required). It probably has false negatives (my company), but it's worth it for you because you have found that it rarely shows false positives.
- sockgrant 5y ago
  Facebook and Google don’t expect 80 weeks and they do leet code interviews. I’d think most people do 40 hour weeks there.
300bps 5y ago
Your comment reminds me of the video where they ask white people in Berkeley, CA if voter id laws are racist. They say yes of course they’re racist because African Americans don’t have id as often, don’t have as much access to the internet, don’t know where the DMV is, etc. Then they go to Harlem to ask people what they think of those comments. https://youtu.be/yW2LpFkVfYk https://youtu.be/yW2LpFkVfYk As for your claims themselves, In 3 months I studied 350 hours to pass the hardest test in finance while I was married, had three young children and worked full time. Nobody has time to do the things required to advance your career. You have to make the time. For years, I also recruited and mentored students from an inner city bootcamp near me where the students spend 80-90 hours per week for 12 weeks learning software engineering. The vast majority of students are minority and there is fierce competition to hire graduates by local companies.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  What’s the hardest test called?
  - 300bps 5y ago
    Google "hardest test in finance" and the CFA exams are the first several pages of results.
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
      The hardest test in finance is a physics/math PhD defence, from MIT or Caltech. CFA is just a decoy.
- learc83 5y ago
  You can select people to display in your man on the street interview segment to make it look like the average American doesn’t know who the President is. Regardless of what some people in Harlem think, data shows that minorities are in fact much less likely to have government ID. https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/download_file_39242.pdf https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/d...
Madmallard 5y ago
"What leetcode does do is make it difficult for minority candidates, those with external obligations, or those with families to get into firms. For example, I work 50+ hours a week with two kids and a parent with cancer. I work hard at work and have a lot of external obligations. I don’t have time or to study leecode problems." This is actually such a bizarro answer I’m surprised it is getting tons of upvotes. All the techniques you learned in school can solve nearly every leetcode problem. You can get good at it with an internet connection and an hour a day. If you're going to work at my company for 2 years you better demonstrate you can do some preparation when there's literally 400 of you applying.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Aeolun 5y ago
  This is always the response, but it still doesn’t make any sense. It’s been 15 years since I’ve been in school, and probably about 5 since the last time any of the things I learned there were relevant outside of interviews. You can certainly get good at it with an internet connection and a hour every day. But that is 50% of the time I have left to myself after all my obligations are fulfilled. Anyway, that’s not the issue. The issue is that the alghoritms tested for in leetcode are never relevant to the performance of my application.
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    If you're not willing to spend an hour every day practicing to get the job the employer doesn't want you. That's the point of leetcode interviews. Find the candidate who wants it the most.
    - danaris 5y ago
      Yes, thanks, we got that. The point is that it is inherently discriminatory against people who don't have the free time to devote to that. ....And it's also kind of disgusting to say that jobs should go to the people who are willing to sacrifice their free time to study utterly pointless interview questions just in order to "prove" to the employer that they "want it most". That's essentially selecting for those willing to worship at the altar of the company—corporate bootlickers. (Don't get me wrong, I can see why employers would want to select for bootlickers. I just think it's disgusting and shouldn't be allowed.)
snth 5y ago
It's just as easy to argue that leetcode-style interviews are because companies are afraid of being discriminatory in hiring. If you aren't allowed to consider culture fit (because it's discriminatory) or education (because it's discriminatory) or give take home work (because it's discriminatory against people with time constraints) or trust your feelings in a qualitative interview (because they're discriminatory), what can you do? Solving real engineering problems takes too long for an interview, and full-day interviews are also discriminatory against people with time constraints. You can candidates give some automated algorithms problem solving test- that's what you can do.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > It's just as easy to argue that leetcode-style interviews are because companies are afraid of being discriminatory in hiring From the hiring side, this is 100% correct. Giving everyone the same coding interview is one of the most effective ways to remove interviewer bias. A lot of HN commenters advocate for a “just trust me” hiring process where they want the interviewer to just read their resume and have a quick chat to decide if the person should be hired, without any type of technical interview. That results in people hiring other people who are as similar to their own backgrounds as possible (everyone likes to think their own background and learning style is optimal). We know LeetCode style tests aren’t perfect, but they’re repeatable and the study material is free and widely available. > or give take home work (because it's discriminatory against people with time constraints) IMO, this complaint is baseless. A lot of companies give the option of LeetCode style interviews or take-homes and almost everybody chooses the take-home. The idea that someone can allocate several hours during their busy day for a live interview but somehow can’t find several hours during the week for a take-home doesn’t even make logical sense.
  - willcipriano 5y ago
    > A lot of HN commenters advocate for a “just trust me” hiring process where they want the interviewer to just read their resume and have a quick chat to decide if the person should be hired That's how your manager is going to be hired, as well as all of his bosses on up.
indymike 5y ago
> I’ve been a software engineer and now architect for 15 years. Studying leetcode like problems won’t help me at my current job or a future employer once I get past their interview processes. Perhaps. I've been building software for over 30 years and I still find that I learn a lot when I practice and push myself to work quickly and efficiently. > If you haven’t seen a particular problem before or had time to research it, it’s unrealistic to expect a candidate to solve it in twenty minutes in a high pressure situation. Someone just slipped a bug into production. We now have $12,399 per minute in transactions that will not be processed. CEO needs a report for a board meeting in 20 minutes. Junior dev didn't show up and four team members were waiting for the commit he was supposed to have in yesterday. Dealing with high pressure problem solving is really every day, and practicing against the clock is a great way to learn to be calm and focused when it matters. > For example, I work 50+ hours a week with two kids and a parent with cancer. So sorry that you are dealing with cancer in your family's life. Cancer sucks.
- namelessoracle 5y ago
  If you have a major bug in production and have to report to the CEO in 20 minutes, all kinds of soft skills that you can show in interviews are going to serve you vastly better than knowing a leetcode algorithm.
- cowl 5y ago
  The situation you describe is not what you face in leetcode. The key here is "a problem space not seen before". Bugs in production by definition are problems in a domain on which you are currently working and are familiar with. So yes in that case I would expect someone to work efficiently even under pressure. But a problem in a completely new problem space no. Someone may know for example that a presented problem can be seen as graph traversal problem but may be blocked for the moment on the actual implementation of it. This is a context switching problem and not a performance problem.
- haspok 5y ago
  I don't think it is fair that you are downvoted, the parallel you are presenting is a real question, eg. how much does being good at leetcode correlate with being good at solving production issues timely and efficiently? (Even if real life production issues are _not_ leetcode problems, but nobody said that.) I don't think that there are any conclusive studies covering this, so both sides might be correct for all we know.
cageface 5y ago
It’s somewhat unhelpful to lump all the questions that leetcode asks in one bucket. I’ve been coding for 25 years and have never once needed to apply any dynamic programming methods. But I did some leetcode prep recently when looking for a new job and reviewing some of the tree and graph algorithms wasn’t totally useless because those things do come up from time to time in regular dev work.
- lfowles 5y ago
  That's fair, but you also don't usually get the luxury of telling the interviewer that you only studied the tree and graph problems so you won't be doing any dynamic programming questions they happen to ask.
- fault1 5y ago
  Have you ever done much optimization or worked on solvers? DP tends to come up often in that type of work.
- 62951413 5y ago
  I'm with you on this. I don't remember much of algo questions before 2010 outside of actual GOOG. If anything, OOP design like "for a game of chess" were common in LNKD-like companies. And j.u.c-like real life knowledge. I remember being asked to implement quick sort or reverse a list in 2010 or so. Then to do DFS on a graph or detect all connected subareas of a matrix in 2015. DP questions were so new I din't know what they were back then. I had interviews last year with two out of three rounds being DP puzzles. I don't know about junior engineers but I want to go outside at least on weekends and not think much about computers. So the hours I have for "studying" can be spent either on learning something new and useful (Flink? ML? golang generics?) or memorizing this mindless leetcoding. I've done development for too long to have any interest in algo trivia or problems not based in real life situations.
  - fault1 5y ago
    I would say going further back in time, for example, MSFT during the early 2000s, the interviews were far worse, it was "fermi" types of questions (e.g, https://www.innovativeteachingideas.com/blog/an-excellent-collection-of-fermi-problems-for-your-class https://www.innovativeteachingideas.com/blog/an-excellent-co...) Often the same thing in for example, typical wall street firms before 2008.
_Understated_ 5y ago
You mentioned "minority candidates" twice there. Both times it was in reference to them being at a disadvantage. I read that to mean that the tests are geared towards white candidates! Is that really what you mean? Coz I can't wrap my head around that!
- bufferoverflow 5y ago
  It's woke nonsense. These tests are obviously color blind. And I bet Asians (a minority) , as usual, do better on them on average than the white candidates. Not because the tests are designed for Asians, but because of culture of studying hard.
  - memonkey 5y ago
    Uhh, this is a model minority myth. https://thepractice.law.harvard.edu/article/the-model-minority-myth/ https://thepractice.law.harvard.edu/article/the-model-minori...
    - bufferoverflow 5y ago
      So their argument is "Asians are diverse, with a wide range of earnings, therefore it's myth". Sorry, but it makes zero sense. You should stop reading obvious illogical propaganda from race activists. Also Asians isn't the only minority group that outperforms whites.
      - gregordv 5y ago
        HN won't let me reply to the parent, but I thought your model minority myth was potentially interesting. In this case, it just doesn't stand up to facts. Yes, Asians have greater income disparity, because the top 1% of Asians are way at the top 1%. According to the U.S. Census (https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-income-households.html https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p...) in every single year, Asians have out-incomed White and all-race averages in the 20th, 40th, 60th, 80th, and 95th percentiles. That's a pretty compelling picture of "Asians make more money than whites," full stop.
rmah 5y ago
I'd argue that exactly the opposite. It allows those who don't look or speak a certain way to shine. It allows people who don't have good contacts and family networks to demonstrate their capabilities. Our firm has every candidate take a quiz of five coding problems. Two of which are quite easy and the remainder a bit more difficult but none of them even approaching "leetcode" levels of difficulty. Even so, let's just say that most candidates don't do very well.
- throwaway2037 5y ago
  I too am supportive of using LeetCode-style easy problems. FizzBuzz used to be all the rage, but dummies have memorised that now. :) For a long time, I used an easy-to-understand, but hard-to-be-perfect interview problem: Please implement the classic C-function atoi() [string to int] in any language. (The candidate cannot use a built-in to do the parse!) The best candidates immediately dissect the problem and start to ask about edge cases. The worst ask no questions and very rarely do a good job, and never think about test cases.
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  As someone who broke into the industry without formal CS education, contacts, or family networks and struggled to speak confidently and coherently in interviews, leetcode didn’t do anything for me except stress me out that much further. I’ve been able to stay comfortably employed and even climb the ranks in software dev for 7 years now, but had it not been for the company that first hired me eschewing the leetcode in favor of practical exercises in their interview, I wouldn’t have gotten in until a couple years later at minimum, assuming the resources required to continue studying held out (I was extremely cash-bare at that point, so absolutely not a given). Now that I have years of experience under my belt it’s not as much of an issue — lots of places want to hire me regardless, but if I really had to I could drill leetcode for a couple months to prep for an interview. Back in the early days that wasn’t really practical, though.
throwaway2037 5y ago
You wrote: <<many of the algorithms used to solve problems took years to develop>> I completely agree. Many years ago, I was challenged during a telephone interview to determine if a linked list contained a cycle. At the time, I did not know about Floyd's cycle-finding algorithm. Of course, I failed the interview miserably, but the experience stayed with me for many years. In 2014, there was a blog post about this exact algorithm and interview question: https://www.nomachetejuggling.com/2014/06/24/the-worst-programming-interview-question/ https://www.nomachetejuggling.com/2014/06/24/the-worst-progr... I pounded the desk when I read it! It was even discussed on HackerNews(!): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7953725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7953725 One way to think about LeetCode is that it helps to expose you to 100+ obscure algorithms that might come up in an "elite-level" interview. Knowing them off the top of your head will either make your look like a robot / genius / both(!). Also, for interviews that require keyboard or whiteboard programming, "kata"[1] is undeniably good for your performance. Like anything, the more you practice, the better your performance will become. Currently, we are interviewing at my office for software engineers. I always interview as a pair with the same person. We have slowly evolved our interviewed in an attempt to find a "local maxima" during a one hour time slot. No, we don't do whiteboard programming -- everything is f'in Zoom/WebEx these days! I struggle with this: With the advent of Java and C#, a lot of average programmers know "enough" algorithms and data structures to get through an interview. How can we push harder to find better than average candidates? I don't know a good way without take-home programming assignments. Asking people to memorize 100 obscure computer science algorithms before an interview is just silly. I would struggle to explain how a sorting algorithm works, but I know all about O-notation for time & space complexity of the best sorting algorithms. (My sort sizes aren't very large, so TimSort[2] works 99% for me.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kata https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kata [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timsort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timsort
- yobbo 5y ago
  > How can we push harder to find better than average candidates? Just ask them where they needed to solve a problem with an algorithm, why/what they did, how they implemented, tested, validated. What other problems could use the same approach, how could the problem be changed to invalidate assumptions, and so on. etc. (While writing I realised that this fails in cases where the interviewers are not competent enough to follow along in random directions, which then gives the rationale for a leetcode quiz - basically a battleship-game that the interviewer prepares in advance so that he can pace the discussion and grade the candidate.)
murph-almighty 5y ago
My pet conspiracy theory is that leetcode is used to exploit imposter syndrome in candidates. After going through an hourlong session where you came up with the less-than-optimal but correct solution, I think it's easy for the interviewers to seem "disappointed" and lowball the candidate with a worse position/salary. I think this partially explains the phenomenon of external candidates at Google entering Google at the college-hire tier when they may have been repeatedly promoted at their prior employer. Of course the comp is usually more so it's not a big deal...
gameswithgo 5y ago
Having been in charge of hiring a few times I can absolutely tell you that coding problems are not motivated by a desire to "skirt around discrimination". There is no need to skirt around it, we could just do it, via whatever method of interview you want to propose. However I have seen the "leetcode" process defeat discrimination at least once in my career, when HR was assuming a black guy was not qualified but he was able to prove himself on the white board. There are plenty of good critiques about the whiteboard process, many of which I agree with, but this critique is silly.
chollida1 5y ago
> I believe leetcode is a way to skirt around discriminatory hiring practices. Can you flesh this out because you claim it but then provide nothing to back it up other than saying minorities don't have time, which just seems to be a strange and unsubstantiated claim. To me these are far better for eliminating discrimination as the interviewer and interviewee can't see each other over a phone screen so there is no racial bias introduced, all you have is can the interviewee code. Plain and simple with far less chance for discrimination than a face to face interview. It's about as close to the famed blind music auditions as we currently have.
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
Yep, I'm waiting for the next Duke Power type case to happen. When I worked for an Am Law 50, we were prohibited from giving coding tests during interviews for developer positions because they could be considered a proxy for a discriminatory metric. Fizz Buzz was the most we could get away with. Even then, it had to be a pencil and paper evaluation.
yodsanklai 5y ago
Why do you think it makes it more difficult for minority candidates than other interview process? I'd argue it's the opposite. Minority candidates have the same access to leetcode than anybody else.
PaulHoule 5y ago
I would say it is the other way around. Stephen Jay Gould's "Mismeasure of Man" appears to be defensive of minorities for protective colorization. The real problem Harvard has is that it is flooded with legacy admissions who couldn't test their way out of a paper bag -- people like Gould get funding because their work supports the interest of those people. By saying it is about minorities they get support from the general public. Standardized testing is a path to opportunity for poor people and other outsiders to demonstrate their talent. It's true that some rich people can improve their results by spending money, but also true that some of them are as dumb as a post and the only way they are going to beat standardized tests is bring in a ringer to take the test for them. In every other aspect of education rich people are much more able to "achievement launder" and use their parents money and connections to appear to punch above their weight. Standardized tests can keep the bottom 40% of those people out.
dokem 5y ago
What does being a minority have to do with freetime? Most of the people I worked with at my first faang were minorities. Seems like weird pandering. Also, If i'm going to pay someone 3-400k a year they better be able to whiteboard out some honestly pretty basic algorithms. They're paying the best, want to hire the 'best', and the 'best' can do this in addition to having systems knowledge or whatever. If you don't want to prepare or find it too difficult then you aren't worth 3-400k because there are enough people that can pass the bar at that price range. And to be honest, I don't think 'grinding' leetcode is really too much to ask for how much you are going to be paid. These complaints always come across as whiney people that want something for nothing. You have to compete.
jeffreyrogers 5y ago
The time commitment is pretty minimal. It takes at most 50 hours of studying to get up to speed on leetcode style problems. There are only about 20 different types and once you learn the patterns they get a lot easier. Professional organizations in other fields require continuing education in excess of that to keep your credentials. If you can't free up 50 hours over the course of a few months that is a time management problem. Worst case you could just spend 1 hour of your work day preparing. Lots of people spend more than that on HN and other sites. The bottom line is there are more qualified applicants than there are spots available. No matter how people are selected some group is going to feel unfairly treated.
wonderwonder 5y ago
How does leetcode make it difficult for minority candidates? My understanding was that its designed to do the opposite, to level the playing field. Note: this is a genuine question, I am interested in understanding your view point.
polski-g 5y ago
Griggs v Ohio made employer IQ tests unlawful, so employers started requiring college degrees. With the push to "give everyone a degree", standards have dropped so now employers can no longer use a degree as a filter for IQ. Thus: leetcode interviews. The solution is to overturn Griggs v Ohio.
- shikoba 5y ago
  > IQ tests unlawful So making a test to see who you'll recruit is unlawful. I don't know what to say.
lhorie 5y ago
I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. Speaking as someone w/ experience on the interviewer side, there are two types of interviewers: the smug ones that evaluate on whether the presented solution matches the one on the answer sheet and the experienced ones that evaluate on signals that correlate to job relevance. I aim to always have interviewees solve the question, even if it means I'm dictating parts to get them unblocked. Because the things I'm looking for are things like fluency w/ the tools, communication, basic understanding of how to apply techniques to a problem, etc, rather than whether they can capitulate on some very specific eureka moment. On the interviewee side, I think many candidates fall into the same mental trap as the smug interviewers; they think of it as a school test where you have to match the answer sheet. In reality it's more about selling yourself to the interviewer in between the lines. I don't really buy the busy family argument; my wife finds time to practice leetcode despite having a full-time job and two kids in the house for a good half of the day. In my experience, people that work more hours per week than the local standard on software roles either have trouble setting expectations w/ stakeholders (and this ability is evaluated in unicorn interview loops for senior level and above) or they just volunteer to overwork when it isn't really necessary. I've seen high-paced environments where the family folks did a consistent 9-to-5 no problem. Extenuating circumstances like family cancer are indeed a valid concern, but at the same time, a minority of cases. I've seen plenty of bitterness along the lines of "some ethnicities/age groups/etc just work too hard" or whatever, but at the end of the day, if we're talking about roles paying north of 200-300k/yr, the dynamics of the incentives will pretty much guarantee that one needs to put above average amount of effort into getting one of those jobs. The thing is there are companies out there like Duolingo or Zapier that are willing to hire from non-hub locations and pay 6 digit salaries, and they may not even ask leetcode questions per se, but their hiring bars are very high nonetheless.
tester756 5y ago
>This process benefits individuals who have the luxury of time to spend preping. Something minorities, working parents, etc. don’t have. How is that different from learning any skill/profession? Everywhere you gotta put time / effort. The difference is that LC questions allow you to get highest paid jobs. Average software shop probably does not require them.
Indomit 5y ago
"This process benefits individuals who have the luxury of time to spend preping. Something minorities, working parents, etc. don’t have." The soft bigotry of low expectations.

by cebert 5y ago

yobbo 5y ago

> skirt around discriminatory hiring practices Yes, maybe we should consider leetcode interview as something of a rorschach-blotch. The interviewer can take the discussion in any direction he wants, under the pretence of "evaluating technical competence" or whatever.

chrismcb 5y ago

This is kind of like saying requiring a bachelor's degree is a way to skirt around discriminatory hiring practices. Ignoring your racists and offensive remarks, getting a job does require studying and prepping, whether you simply study the fundamentals or leetcode.

rightbyte 5y ago

> minority candidates I guess 'poor [edit: low on money] candidates' would be more precise.

cebert 5y ago
How does having ample time to prep for leetcode like problems make you a better candidate exactly?
- quanto 5y ago
  I think GP meant 'poor' as in poverty. It goes with your examples of economic hardship and not having the free time for leetcodes. My charitably interpreting 2c, anyway.
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    Oh ye. I didn't think you could interpret what I wrote as "poor [quality] candidates".
- marcellus23 5y ago
  I’m not him but I read his comment as simply taking issue with the idea that it’s minorities in particular who don’t have time for that, rather than simply poor people. (The terms are not interchangeable, since there are many wealthy people who are members of a minority, and there are many poor white people)
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    Yes thank you. Sometimes you should just write out things explicitly ...
- rerx 5y ago
  Financially poor
- ivanbakel 5y ago
  I think the GP likely meant "poor" in the sense of "destitute", not "poor-quality".
Madmallard 5y ago
I don't remotely understand how. You literally can get good at leetcode with an hour a day for a couple of months provided you studied computer science or even just like took AP Computer Science in high school. And even that just requires an internet connection.
- canyonero 5y ago
  How do you not understand that many people with families or other external obligations wouldn’t have the luxury of spending 7 hours a week for multiple months on leetcode?
  - fault1 5y ago
    Like everything else, it's an opportunity cost. Personally, I think LC is a great return on time invested. It takes far less time and money than say, any of the traditional gatekeepers, even for example a CS degree, or even perhaps a good data structures and algorithms class that is semester long.
  - Madmallard 5y ago
    If they need to spend that level of time in order to do a few search or sort problems on a whiteboard I'd be concerned that they don't actually know algorithms or datastructures. The kinds of questions most companies ask are not hard.
- nopenopenopeno 5y ago
  I am 35 years old and never even heard if a high school computer science course. I spent one period of my last semester assisting the network admin with maintenance tasks, which was the closest thing we had to AP computer anything, and only 2 students in my class had the privilege.

qwytw 5y ago

Ignoring whether leetcode itself is useful or not. Do you believe it's inherently unfair to discriminate in favour of people who dedicated more time to e.g. studying CS theory, contributing to open source projects, working on hobby projects, earning advanced degrees etc. ? All of those things require time and money (in opportunity costs).

cebert 5y ago
No, I think those are great ways to stand out and demonstrate interest and side projects and degrees are more representative of actual work. Leetcode itself though seems to be used as a gatekeeper benefiting those with the luxury of time to do the grind. It doesn’t mean you’re necessarily getting more qualified candidates and are possibly excluding some folks who would be more than capable.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  Finding people with too much free time is the entire point of leetcode. Companies want employees who will dedicate their life to their work. If you don't have time to grind leetcode employers feel that you won't have time to work 60 hours a week and spend your free time thinking about work.
  - giraffe_lady 5y ago
    I think it's more common that people just have the unexamined assumption that programming skill is more of a natural talent than it is, and also that these tools are an effective way to test for that talent. I'm sure what you're talking about happens too, but I've seen the other thing first hand a couple times so I know it can be less malicious than that.
  - Tyr42 5y ago
    I think people have over updated on spending free time on leetcode is the only way to solve these problems, but as a undergrad doing internship interviews, the problems weren't that hard? Has it gotten worse in the last 5 years?

Dave3of5 5y ago

Yeah I agree I'm similar to you in that I'm a parent with 2 kids 16 years exp and these leetcode tests kick my butt. The companies making you do this though likely don't want someone like me. They want someone young who will burn themselves out working 80 hours a week for them. So I guess it's a good filter for me as well.

pawelmurias 5y ago
Almost nobody would stay productive coding 80 hours per week.
- danlugo92 5y ago
  Almost nobody is productive past the 30 hours a week stage (excl meetings and lunch hour and whatnot).
squidlogic 5y ago
I'm doing the hiring for a small company. We do coding tests as part of our interview process. I know it can show false negatives but it rarely shows false positives (wrt coding ability). However, we don't ask employees to work anything like 80 hours a week. In fact, we track overtime hours (> 40hrs/wk) and pull the red "panic" lever when it goes above a threshold as a control for burnout. But like you said, you're applying a filter too (if no coding test -> low overtime required). It probably has false negatives (my company), but it's worth it for you because you have found that it rarely shows false positives.
sockgrant 5y ago
Facebook and Google don’t expect 80 weeks and they do leet code interviews. I’d think most people do 40 hour weeks there.

300bps 5y ago

Your comment reminds me of the video where they ask white people in Berkeley, CA if voter id laws are racist. They say yes of course they’re racist because African Americans don’t have id as often, don’t have as much access to the internet, don’t know where the DMV is, etc. Then they go to Harlem to ask people what they think of those comments. https://youtu.be/yW2LpFkVfYk https://youtu.be/yW2LpFkVfYk As for your claims themselves, In 3 months I studied 350 hours to pass the hardest test in finance while I was married, had three young children and worked full time. Nobody has time to do the things required to advance your career. You have to make the time. For years, I also recruited and mentored students from an inner city bootcamp near me where the students spend 80-90 hours per week for 12 weeks learning software engineering. The vast majority of students are minority and there is fierce competition to hire graduates by local companies.

inter_netuser 5y ago
What’s the hardest test called?
- 300bps 5y ago
  Google "hardest test in finance" and the CFA exams are the first several pages of results.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    The hardest test in finance is a physics/math PhD defence, from MIT or Caltech. CFA is just a decoy.
learc83 5y ago
You can select people to display in your man on the street interview segment to make it look like the average American doesn’t know who the President is. Regardless of what some people in Harlem think, data shows that minorities are in fact much less likely to have government ID. https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/download_file_39242.pdf https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/d...

Madmallard 5y ago

"What leetcode does do is make it difficult for minority candidates, those with external obligations, or those with families to get into firms. For example, I work 50+ hours a week with two kids and a parent with cancer. I work hard at work and have a lot of external obligations. I don’t have time or to study leecode problems." This is actually such a bizarro answer I’m surprised it is getting tons of upvotes. All the techniques you learned in school can solve nearly every leetcode problem. You can get good at it with an internet connection and an hour a day. If you're going to work at my company for 2 years you better demonstrate you can do some preparation when there's literally 400 of you applying.

deleted 5y ago
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Aeolun 5y ago
This is always the response, but it still doesn’t make any sense. It’s been 15 years since I’ve been in school, and probably about 5 since the last time any of the things I learned there were relevant outside of interviews. You can certainly get good at it with an internet connection and a hour every day. But that is 50% of the time I have left to myself after all my obligations are fulfilled. Anyway, that’s not the issue. The issue is that the alghoritms tested for in leetcode are never relevant to the performance of my application.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  If you're not willing to spend an hour every day practicing to get the job the employer doesn't want you. That's the point of leetcode interviews. Find the candidate who wants it the most.
  - danaris 5y ago
    Yes, thanks, we got that. The point is that it is inherently discriminatory against people who don't have the free time to devote to that. ....And it's also kind of disgusting to say that jobs should go to the people who are willing to sacrifice their free time to study utterly pointless interview questions just in order to "prove" to the employer that they "want it most". That's essentially selecting for those willing to worship at the altar of the company—corporate bootlickers. (Don't get me wrong, I can see why employers would want to select for bootlickers. I just think it's disgusting and shouldn't be allowed.)

snth 5y ago

It's just as easy to argue that leetcode-style interviews are because companies are afraid of being discriminatory in hiring. If you aren't allowed to consider culture fit (because it's discriminatory) or education (because it's discriminatory) or give take home work (because it's discriminatory against people with time constraints) or trust your feelings in a qualitative interview (because they're discriminatory), what can you do? Solving real engineering problems takes too long for an interview, and full-day interviews are also discriminatory against people with time constraints. You can candidates give some automated algorithms problem solving test- that's what you can do.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> It's just as easy to argue that leetcode-style interviews are because companies are afraid of being discriminatory in hiring From the hiring side, this is 100% correct. Giving everyone the same coding interview is one of the most effective ways to remove interviewer bias. A lot of HN commenters advocate for a “just trust me” hiring process where they want the interviewer to just read their resume and have a quick chat to decide if the person should be hired, without any type of technical interview. That results in people hiring other people who are as similar to their own backgrounds as possible (everyone likes to think their own background and learning style is optimal). We know LeetCode style tests aren’t perfect, but they’re repeatable and the study material is free and widely available. > or give take home work (because it's discriminatory against people with time constraints) IMO, this complaint is baseless. A lot of companies give the option of LeetCode style interviews or take-homes and almost everybody chooses the take-home. The idea that someone can allocate several hours during their busy day for a live interview but somehow can’t find several hours during the week for a take-home doesn’t even make logical sense.
- willcipriano 5y ago
  > A lot of HN commenters advocate for a “just trust me” hiring process where they want the interviewer to just read their resume and have a quick chat to decide if the person should be hired That's how your manager is going to be hired, as well as all of his bosses on up.

indymike 5y ago

> I’ve been a software engineer and now architect for 15 years. Studying leetcode like problems won’t help me at my current job or a future employer once I get past their interview processes. Perhaps. I've been building software for over 30 years and I still find that I learn a lot when I practice and push myself to work quickly and efficiently. > If you haven’t seen a particular problem before or had time to research it, it’s unrealistic to expect a candidate to solve it in twenty minutes in a high pressure situation. Someone just slipped a bug into production. We now have $12,399 per minute in transactions that will not be processed. CEO needs a report for a board meeting in 20 minutes. Junior dev didn't show up and four team members were waiting for the commit he was supposed to have in yesterday. Dealing with high pressure problem solving is really every day, and practicing against the clock is a great way to learn to be calm and focused when it matters. > For example, I work 50+ hours a week with two kids and a parent with cancer. So sorry that you are dealing with cancer in your family's life. Cancer sucks.

namelessoracle 5y ago
If you have a major bug in production and have to report to the CEO in 20 minutes, all kinds of soft skills that you can show in interviews are going to serve you vastly better than knowing a leetcode algorithm.
cowl 5y ago
The situation you describe is not what you face in leetcode. The key here is "a problem space not seen before". Bugs in production by definition are problems in a domain on which you are currently working and are familiar with. So yes in that case I would expect someone to work efficiently even under pressure. But a problem in a completely new problem space no. Someone may know for example that a presented problem can be seen as graph traversal problem but may be blocked for the moment on the actual implementation of it. This is a context switching problem and not a performance problem.
haspok 5y ago
I don't think it is fair that you are downvoted, the parallel you are presenting is a real question, eg. how much does being good at leetcode correlate with being good at solving production issues timely and efficiently? (Even if real life production issues are _not_ leetcode problems, but nobody said that.) I don't think that there are any conclusive studies covering this, so both sides might be correct for all we know.

cageface 5y ago

It’s somewhat unhelpful to lump all the questions that leetcode asks in one bucket. I’ve been coding for 25 years and have never once needed to apply any dynamic programming methods. But I did some leetcode prep recently when looking for a new job and reviewing some of the tree and graph algorithms wasn’t totally useless because those things do come up from time to time in regular dev work.

lfowles 5y ago
That's fair, but you also don't usually get the luxury of telling the interviewer that you only studied the tree and graph problems so you won't be doing any dynamic programming questions they happen to ask.
fault1 5y ago
Have you ever done much optimization or worked on solvers? DP tends to come up often in that type of work.
62951413 5y ago
I'm with you on this. I don't remember much of algo questions before 2010 outside of actual GOOG. If anything, OOP design like "for a game of chess" were common in LNKD-like companies. And j.u.c-like real life knowledge. I remember being asked to implement quick sort or reverse a list in 2010 or so. Then to do DFS on a graph or detect all connected subareas of a matrix in 2015. DP questions were so new I din't know what they were back then. I had interviews last year with two out of three rounds being DP puzzles. I don't know about junior engineers but I want to go outside at least on weekends and not think much about computers. So the hours I have for "studying" can be spent either on learning something new and useful (Flink? ML? golang generics?) or memorizing this mindless leetcoding. I've done development for too long to have any interest in algo trivia or problems not based in real life situations.
- fault1 5y ago
  I would say going further back in time, for example, MSFT during the early 2000s, the interviews were far worse, it was "fermi" types of questions (e.g, https://www.innovativeteachingideas.com/blog/an-excellent-collection-of-fermi-problems-for-your-class https://www.innovativeteachingideas.com/blog/an-excellent-co...) Often the same thing in for example, typical wall street firms before 2008.

_Understated_ 5y ago

You mentioned "minority candidates" twice there. Both times it was in reference to them being at a disadvantage. I read that to mean that the tests are geared towards white candidates! Is that really what you mean? Coz I can't wrap my head around that!

bufferoverflow 5y ago
It's woke nonsense. These tests are obviously color blind. And I bet Asians (a minority) , as usual, do better on them on average than the white candidates. Not because the tests are designed for Asians, but because of culture of studying hard.
- memonkey 5y ago
  Uhh, this is a model minority myth. https://thepractice.law.harvard.edu/article/the-model-minority-myth/ https://thepractice.law.harvard.edu/article/the-model-minori...
  - bufferoverflow 5y ago
    So their argument is "Asians are diverse, with a wide range of earnings, therefore it's myth". Sorry, but it makes zero sense. You should stop reading obvious illogical propaganda from race activists. Also Asians isn't the only minority group that outperforms whites.
    - gregordv 5y ago
      HN won't let me reply to the parent, but I thought your model minority myth was potentially interesting. In this case, it just doesn't stand up to facts. Yes, Asians have greater income disparity, because the top 1% of Asians are way at the top 1%. According to the U.S. Census (https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-income-households.html https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p...) in every single year, Asians have out-incomed White and all-race averages in the 20th, 40th, 60th, 80th, and 95th percentiles. That's a pretty compelling picture of "Asians make more money than whites," full stop.

rmah 5y ago

I'd argue that exactly the opposite. It allows those who don't look or speak a certain way to shine. It allows people who don't have good contacts and family networks to demonstrate their capabilities. Our firm has every candidate take a quiz of five coding problems. Two of which are quite easy and the remainder a bit more difficult but none of them even approaching "leetcode" levels of difficulty. Even so, let's just say that most candidates don't do very well.

throwaway2037 5y ago
I too am supportive of using LeetCode-style easy problems. FizzBuzz used to be all the rage, but dummies have memorised that now. :) For a long time, I used an easy-to-understand, but hard-to-be-perfect interview problem: Please implement the classic C-function atoi() [string to int] in any language. (The candidate cannot use a built-in to do the parse!) The best candidates immediately dissect the problem and start to ask about edge cases. The worst ask no questions and very rarely do a good job, and never think about test cases.
kitsunesoba 5y ago
As someone who broke into the industry without formal CS education, contacts, or family networks and struggled to speak confidently and coherently in interviews, leetcode didn’t do anything for me except stress me out that much further. I’ve been able to stay comfortably employed and even climb the ranks in software dev for 7 years now, but had it not been for the company that first hired me eschewing the leetcode in favor of practical exercises in their interview, I wouldn’t have gotten in until a couple years later at minimum, assuming the resources required to continue studying held out (I was extremely cash-bare at that point, so absolutely not a given). Now that I have years of experience under my belt it’s not as much of an issue — lots of places want to hire me regardless, but if I really had to I could drill leetcode for a couple months to prep for an interview. Back in the early days that wasn’t really practical, though.

throwaway2037 5y ago

You wrote: <<many of the algorithms used to solve problems took years to develop>> I completely agree. Many years ago, I was challenged during a telephone interview to determine if a linked list contained a cycle. At the time, I did not know about Floyd's cycle-finding algorithm. Of course, I failed the interview miserably, but the experience stayed with me for many years. In 2014, there was a blog post about this exact algorithm and interview question: https://www.nomachetejuggling.com/2014/06/24/the-worst-programming-interview-question/ https://www.nomachetejuggling.com/2014/06/24/the-worst-progr... I pounded the desk when I read it! It was even discussed on HackerNews(!): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7953725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7953725 One way to think about LeetCode is that it helps to expose you to 100+ obscure algorithms that might come up in an "elite-level" interview. Knowing them off the top of your head will either make your look like a robot / genius / both(!). Also, for interviews that require keyboard or whiteboard programming, "kata"[1] is undeniably good for your performance. Like anything, the more you practice, the better your performance will become. Currently, we are interviewing at my office for software engineers. I always interview as a pair with the same person. We have slowly evolved our interviewed in an attempt to find a "local maxima" during a one hour time slot. No, we don't do whiteboard programming -- everything is f'in Zoom/WebEx these days! I struggle with this: With the advent of Java and C#, a lot of average programmers know "enough" algorithms and data structures to get through an interview. How can we push harder to find better than average candidates? I don't know a good way without take-home programming assignments. Asking people to memorize 100 obscure computer science algorithms before an interview is just silly. I would struggle to explain how a sorting algorithm works, but I know all about O-notation for time & space complexity of the best sorting algorithms. (My sort sizes aren't very large, so TimSort[2] works 99% for me.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kata https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kata [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timsort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timsort

yobbo 5y ago
> How can we push harder to find better than average candidates? Just ask them where they needed to solve a problem with an algorithm, why/what they did, how they implemented, tested, validated. What other problems could use the same approach, how could the problem be changed to invalidate assumptions, and so on. etc. (While writing I realised that this fails in cases where the interviewers are not competent enough to follow along in random directions, which then gives the rationale for a leetcode quiz - basically a battleship-game that the interviewer prepares in advance so that he can pace the discussion and grade the candidate.)

murph-almighty 5y ago

My pet conspiracy theory is that leetcode is used to exploit imposter syndrome in candidates. After going through an hourlong session where you came up with the less-than-optimal but correct solution, I think it's easy for the interviewers to seem "disappointed" and lowball the candidate with a worse position/salary. I think this partially explains the phenomenon of external candidates at Google entering Google at the college-hire tier when they may have been repeatedly promoted at their prior employer. Of course the comp is usually more so it's not a big deal...

gameswithgo 5y ago

Having been in charge of hiring a few times I can absolutely tell you that coding problems are not motivated by a desire to "skirt around discrimination". There is no need to skirt around it, we could just do it, via whatever method of interview you want to propose. However I have seen the "leetcode" process defeat discrimination at least once in my career, when HR was assuming a black guy was not qualified but he was able to prove himself on the white board. There are plenty of good critiques about the whiteboard process, many of which I agree with, but this critique is silly.

chollida1 5y ago

> I believe leetcode is a way to skirt around discriminatory hiring practices. Can you flesh this out because you claim it but then provide nothing to back it up other than saying minorities don't have time, which just seems to be a strange and unsubstantiated claim. To me these are far better for eliminating discrimination as the interviewer and interviewee can't see each other over a phone screen so there is no racial bias introduced, all you have is can the interviewee code. Plain and simple with far less chance for discrimination than a face to face interview. It's about as close to the famed blind music auditions as we currently have.

Mountain_Skies 5y ago

Yep, I'm waiting for the next Duke Power type case to happen. When I worked for an Am Law 50, we were prohibited from giving coding tests during interviews for developer positions because they could be considered a proxy for a discriminatory metric. Fizz Buzz was the most we could get away with. Even then, it had to be a pencil and paper evaluation.

yodsanklai 5y ago

Why do you think it makes it more difficult for minority candidates than other interview process? I'd argue it's the opposite. Minority candidates have the same access to leetcode than anybody else.

PaulHoule 5y ago

I would say it is the other way around. Stephen Jay Gould's "Mismeasure of Man" appears to be defensive of minorities for protective colorization. The real problem Harvard has is that it is flooded with legacy admissions who couldn't test their way out of a paper bag -- people like Gould get funding because their work supports the interest of those people. By saying it is about minorities they get support from the general public. Standardized testing is a path to opportunity for poor people and other outsiders to demonstrate their talent. It's true that some rich people can improve their results by spending money, but also true that some of them are as dumb as a post and the only way they are going to beat standardized tests is bring in a ringer to take the test for them. In every other aspect of education rich people are much more able to "achievement launder" and use their parents money and connections to appear to punch above their weight. Standardized tests can keep the bottom 40% of those people out.

dokem 5y ago

What does being a minority have to do with freetime? Most of the people I worked with at my first faang were minorities. Seems like weird pandering. Also, If i'm going to pay someone 3-400k a year they better be able to whiteboard out some honestly pretty basic algorithms. They're paying the best, want to hire the 'best', and the 'best' can do this in addition to having systems knowledge or whatever. If you don't want to prepare or find it too difficult then you aren't worth 3-400k because there are enough people that can pass the bar at that price range. And to be honest, I don't think 'grinding' leetcode is really too much to ask for how much you are going to be paid. These complaints always come across as whiney people that want something for nothing. You have to compete.

jeffreyrogers 5y ago

The time commitment is pretty minimal. It takes at most 50 hours of studying to get up to speed on leetcode style problems. There are only about 20 different types and once you learn the patterns they get a lot easier. Professional organizations in other fields require continuing education in excess of that to keep your credentials. If you can't free up 50 hours over the course of a few months that is a time management problem. Worst case you could just spend 1 hour of your work day preparing. Lots of people spend more than that on HN and other sites. The bottom line is there are more qualified applicants than there are spots available. No matter how people are selected some group is going to feel unfairly treated.

wonderwonder 5y ago

How does leetcode make it difficult for minority candidates? My understanding was that its designed to do the opposite, to level the playing field. Note: this is a genuine question, I am interested in understanding your view point.

polski-g 5y ago

Griggs v Ohio made employer IQ tests unlawful, so employers started requiring college degrees. With the push to "give everyone a degree", standards have dropped so now employers can no longer use a degree as a filter for IQ. Thus: leetcode interviews. The solution is to overturn Griggs v Ohio.

shikoba 5y ago
> IQ tests unlawful So making a test to see who you'll recruit is unlawful. I don't know what to say.

lhorie 5y ago

I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. Speaking as someone w/ experience on the interviewer side, there are two types of interviewers: the smug ones that evaluate on whether the presented solution matches the one on the answer sheet and the experienced ones that evaluate on signals that correlate to job relevance. I aim to always have interviewees solve the question, even if it means I'm dictating parts to get them unblocked. Because the things I'm looking for are things like fluency w/ the tools, communication, basic understanding of how to apply techniques to a problem, etc, rather than whether they can capitulate on some very specific eureka moment. On the interviewee side, I think many candidates fall into the same mental trap as the smug interviewers; they think of it as a school test where you have to match the answer sheet. In reality it's more about selling yourself to the interviewer in between the lines. I don't really buy the busy family argument; my wife finds time to practice leetcode despite having a full-time job and two kids in the house for a good half of the day. In my experience, people that work more hours per week than the local standard on software roles either have trouble setting expectations w/ stakeholders (and this ability is evaluated in unicorn interview loops for senior level and above) or they just volunteer to overwork when it isn't really necessary. I've seen high-paced environments where the family folks did a consistent 9-to-5 no problem. Extenuating circumstances like family cancer are indeed a valid concern, but at the same time, a minority of cases. I've seen plenty of bitterness along the lines of "some ethnicities/age groups/etc just work too hard" or whatever, but at the end of the day, if we're talking about roles paying north of 200-300k/yr, the dynamics of the incentives will pretty much guarantee that one needs to put above average amount of effort into getting one of those jobs. The thing is there are companies out there like Duolingo or Zapier that are willing to hire from non-hub locations and pay 6 digit salaries, and they may not even ask leetcode questions per se, but their hiring bars are very high nonetheless.

tester756 5y ago

>This process benefits individuals who have the luxury of time to spend preping. Something minorities, working parents, etc. don’t have. How is that different from learning any skill/profession? Everywhere you gotta put time / effort. The difference is that LC questions allow you to get highest paid jobs. Average software shop probably does not require them.

Indomit 5y ago

"This process benefits individuals who have the luxury of time to spend preping. Something minorities, working parents, etc. don’t have." The soft bigotry of low expectations.