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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

by 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.
  - binaryorganic 5y ago
    *their bosses.
    - throwaway2037 5y ago
      Thank you. I noticed this a lot on HN, but I don't know how to react. There is a common presumption that co-workers and managers will be men. It bothers me. I work in Asia where there are lots of talented women engineers. Each time I read one of those sentences, I do a double take!
      - brimble 5y ago
        I'm pretty sure most people over ~30 in the US were taught that was the correct form. Common usage has changed only very recently. At any rate, as long as using the feminine is fine, so's using the masculine. Some writers even use both, switching between them. Me, I much prefer the singular-they, because I don't think keeping masculine the standard is tenable or desirable, and I find writing that uses the feminine harder to read (because there's a vast body of existing writing that defaults to masculine and it's by far the bulk of all material I've read in my life, so if I see a feminine pronoun it throws me off for a second as my brain reflexively starts to try to figure out who exactly we're talking about—this is getting better as the practice is wider-spread, but c'mon, let's just use the singular-they) and because it doesn't tend to generate discussion about pronoun choice. [EDIT] fixed a mis-labeling.
    - willcipriano 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_languages_with_gendered_third-person_pronouns#Generic_he https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_languages...
      - culturestate 5y ago
        This strikes me as one of those linguistic squabbles - along with changing the definition of literally to include figuratively - where we just need to accept that language evolves, and usages that may be historically correct aren’t necessarily justifiable in a modern context.
- snth 5y ago
  > 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. I personally like take-home problems. It's hard for an employer to time-box them without resorting to basically leetcode though. I know that, as a student, I definitely spent many hours on them.
- mabub24 5y ago
  > Giving everyone the same coding interview is one of the most effective ways to remove interviewer bias. I'm sympathetic to the hiring side argument. But, I don't think the parent comment is insinuating that no technical question or test be asked of the applicant. They're not insisting on trust, they're insisting on showing their own intelligence. They're saying that the test or technical question should be directly applicable to the job at hand, for the company at hand. You can just as easily ask every single person who applies the same specific questions for the role at hand in your company. You don't need to rely on generic leetcode questions if they don't specifically apply to the job at hand. In other words, hiring needs to actually be specific and targeted rather than adopting the "cast a wide net and catch whatever we can" strategy that many places seem to employ. 9/10 it feels like the insistence on leetcode from hiring comes as an excuse for rather weak recruiting standards and practices.
- throwaway2037 5y ago
  Ace Greenberg from Bear Stearns (former US investment bank) used to say the trouble with hiring friends and family: "You get 100% of the dummies." Sure, you get a few good ones, but you also get the lousy ones.
- rebeccaskinner 5y ago
  > We know LeetCode style tests aren’t perfect, but they’re repeatable and the study material is free and widely available. One of the things that gets me here on the hiring side is that the ease of “grinding leetcode” as a strategy seems to defeat the entire purpose of it as an interview question. I don’t want to dismiss the value of someone being able to study a skill and learn it, but I see a lot of people fixated on rehearsing leetcode answers like they were magical incantations you recite to get jobs, there’s not always a lot of real learning happening. That’s not reflective of the kind of candidates I’d want to hire or the peers I’d want to work with. > A lot of companies give the option of LeetCode style interviews or take-homes and almost everybody chooses the take-home. If true I’d like to see more of this. No hiring process is good for everyone and I think flexibility can be a better way to make a process fair, but I haven’t seen much of it personally. I don’t think I’ve personally gotten a leetcode problem at an interview in years- takehome problems have been the more common screening tool, but I don’t think I’ve ever been offered a choice in the matter. > 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. I’m not sure this is entirely on the mark. On problem with takehome a is asymmetry. Most take home assignments I’ve gotten have come toward the end of an interview process, and there fine, but when I talk to more Junior folks it seems like they are often given hours long takehome problems before they ever talk to a human. That seems disrespectful of peoples time- it’s a lot to ask from someone who doesn’t even know if they are a fit or want your job yet. In any case the hours long takehome is usually in addition to an bourse long set of interviews- not in lieu of them. Another common problem pre-Covid was that a lot of people just weren’t set up to work from home so it was harder to get the space and time to work on a project at home. I expect that’s probably changed a lot these days though.
  - brimble 5y ago
    > One of the things that gets me here on the hiring side is that the ease of “grinding leetcode” as a strategy seems to defeat the entire purpose of it as an interview question. I think that's irrelevant for FAANG and friends. They pay so high that they can afford to make their interviews so miserable and time-intensive to prepare for that tons of people never even try, purely as a first-pass filter. They don't care that you can prep for it, they just want it to be (exactly the right amount of) scary and unpleasant. The resulting, self-selected group probably is, in fact, far better on average than the set of all software developers, including those who never apply to those sorts of jobs (but might if the interviews were less awful). Furthermore I think that's why some results show that they could randomly select candidates and do about as well as the interview process does—sure, maybe, but they could not do that if the set of people applying wasn't already heavily biased to have a fairly high average skill level (& IQ, that's absolutely part of what they're filtering for). Now, companies paying half or less what FAANG does and trying to do anything remotely similar, are simply making a mistake. People with a tolerance for and ability to pass those kinds of interviews are going to apply to the much-higher-paying options, not to your company.
- fallingknife 5y ago
  The issue with take homes is that they are at the beginning of the process where you might have hundreds of candidates. I won't invest several hours in that. Whereas on-sites are the last stage in the process, so it's better than 50-50 that I'll get an offer out of it. So in that case I'm happy to take the time.
- mattkrause 5y ago
  Leetcode or "just trust me" feels like a false dichotomy. Biotech interviews, for example, are usually conversational: what have you worked on before[0], how would you tackle this new problem, or troubleshoot a particular problem. There's this persistent meme that charlatans can BS their way though such an interview, but I really don't see how someone could learn enough to parrot their way through 4-5 x 45 minute meetings, often with fairly probing questions. It felt quite a bit like a thesis defense, in fact. It's true that these aren't "repeatable": each applicant won't have exactly the same experience. This is "unbiased", in a sense[1], but has enormous variance: you're not only testing the applicant's aptitude, but also whether they've encountered this particular problem before. OTOH, tailoring the interview to each applicant' strengths might inject a little bias in exchange for a massive reduction in variance. [0] It does help that candidates for these jobs had masters/PhDs, and therefore had at least one project they could discuss publicly. [1] But not really...There's a subjective element to "code quality", fluency, whether the applicant wrote "enough" tests, etc.
  - deeg 5y ago
    My guess (I have no experience in the biotech industry) is that this is largely because you can't run an hour-long experiment with the candidate to test their competence. They must rely on a conversational technique. I don't know how much we can compare software with other industries. The software industry is unique (or so we think) in that we can directly test a candidate to judge their competency in an hour, either by white-boarding or going over a take-home problem (or similar).
    - brimble 5y ago
      Plenty of other industries could come up with barely-related-to-your-day-job stealth-IQ/how-bad-do-you-want-this test, but don't.
    - notch656a 5y ago
      I don't think that's accurate. The most effective hiring process I've been through is one where there was basically no interview, I was given contract work to perform during which I was compensated for necessary company tasks with no real expectation of enduring relationship. After a few days of performing tasks to the satisfaction of the company, I was offered a permanent position. Not only did this process eliminate the BS, it allowed me to perform a task in a relatively low-pressure but high yield setting while simultaneously not exploiting me (I got paid) and allowed the employer to see how I would actually behave as an employee. This is also the longest and most successful position I've held, partially because there is no lingering bitterness and hatefulness I've harbored at those expecting me to solve bullshit problems for free, like some kind of performing monkey.
aw9f70gae 5y ago
In that case couldn’t you give an automated test that more pertains to the job requirements and the applicants’ prior experience?
- dahfizz 5y ago
  Giving each applicant a tailored test also opens yourself to allegations of discrimination. As for leet code vs an actually relevant test - I think this is probably laziness on the interviewer's part. Coming up with a good test (and keeping it up to date) is hard, and leet code questions are "good enough" to filter out the people who don't know what they are doing. Remember, most companies are fine with a high false negative rate if it keeps false positives low.
  - notch656a 5y ago
    Is discrimination even illegal? I thought unless it was a protected class, discrimination is ok. Unless you're giving all black people a shittier test or something I feel like it's a long and expensive road ahead of someone pursuing legal action, with probably not much to gain and no attorney particularly interested unless it is some class action against a big company.
    - dahfizz 5y ago
      > I thought unless it was a protected class, discrimination is ok. That is also my understanding, but everyone except young white males are in a protected class. Granted, young white males are pretty common in tech, but you would still be wise to design your HR practices in such a way as to avoid lawsuits.
      - notch656a 5y ago
        Agreed it would be wise to consider lawsuits when hiring. I do think though that's only one part of the equation. What you want to really optimize for is maximizing profit. Maximized profit may mean paying out lawsuits is cheaper than losing good candidates or implementing a poor or ineffective hiring process. There's also the risk of implementing a hiring process for which the expense of minimizing lawsuits is greater than the potential lawsuits themselves.
vsareto 5y ago
>what can you do? We need a credential that counts as passing a technical interview, so we don't have to take these tests for every single job that we apply to. If I pass a coding test, stay at a company for a year, then apply to other companies, I'm going to subjected to coding tests even though I just passed one only a year ago. It's like companies are afraid that programmers will spontaneously forget how to program. A credential's test is not limited by the very time constrained format of interviews. This means it could ask more questions to reduce false positives. People would be willing to invest time because it saves them the hassle of interviews in the future. A centralized testing entity could work to reduce cheating instead of every company having to do that themselves. Plus, administering this test would be full time jobs for folks, so it would likely be a higher quality test than what most companies give.
- adbachman 5y ago
  > We need a credential that counts as passing a technical interview This idea already exists in many forms. Pick any language, platform, or technical concept and there's someone offering training and certification. It also describes the whole recruiting industry. "What if there was one person who did a lot of interviews and then presented just the best people to employers?" It's an extremely human incentive alignment problem. Any certification program, interview farm, or bootcamp that makes more money when they produce more candidates will make quantity the goal, not quality. If you can figure out that problem, maybe there's a niche. Otherwise, it puts us right where we already are.
  - vsareto 5y ago
    The trainings and certifications won't let you bypass technical interviews though. There's still inherent distrust of them. We need a credential good enough that companies can trust. Most of the recruiters I deal with are only doing screens and maybe soft interviews -- I may be on the lower rungs of the ladder here though. For the last point, I'll offer Offensive Security as an example because I have one of their certs. OS wants people in its programs as we're a source of income, obviously, but they don't get revenue from people passing. In fact, they get more revenue if you don't pass because they charge per attempt. They offer training for organizations too. They also act as a verification service for their certifications: https://help.offensive-security.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040160152-How-do-I-verify-someone-s-certification-or-how-can-I-have-my-certification-verified- https://help.offensive-security.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040... The idea for a programming credential would be the same: an organization that offers training, doesn't make money on pass rates, and also is a trusted point of verification. Some companies have offered to do technical interviews, then pass you to employers. This is a start, but it isn't industry wide.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nebula8804 5y ago
Wait isn't it only illegal to consider Race/religion/sexual orientation? Have these other criteria become officially illegal or just a possible lawsuit? I can't see how any company looking to build a good team wouldn't consider culture fit. One bad hire could tank a team so I'd imagine they are very cautious?
- mattkrause 5y ago
  Age (>40) and family status are definitely on the list as well.
  - throwaway2037 5y ago
    I assume you are referring to United States employment law? For others: https://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination https://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Age Discrimination: <<The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) forbids age discrimination against people who are age 40 or older. It does not protect workers under the age of 40, although some states have laws that protect younger workers from age discrimination.>>
    - mattkrause 5y ago
      Yes, but it's similar in Canada and Germany* too. * German academia has some incredibly stupid rules related to time-since-graduation, but age per se is a protected class.
- thesuitonym 5y ago
  What's legal varies by location, but even if it's not illegal to discriminate against the other criteria in the GP's list, a company may consider those factors and try to avoid that discrimination anyway. After all, you want the best candidate, regardless of what their home life is like.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  It's illegal to use proxy metrics that impact a protected class more than others. This is to prevent companies from discriminating by hiding behind tests whose main purpose isn't to match on skills needed for the job but to filter out members of protected classes. An employer can prohibit the wearing of a turban if it is a legitimate safety hazard. They can't prohibit it if the purpose is to ensure no Sikhs get hired. What's the purpose of leetcode? Does it map directly to a job's primary task or is it a way of filtering out certain protected classes such as those of an older age?
managerclass 5y ago
If the true purpose of algorithm tests was to be non-discriminatory, the interview and interviewee should not be able to see each other, their voices should be masked to hide nationality/accent, and resumes should not be viewed when solving the problems. I assure you I can still discriminate against a candidate both consciously and subconsciously during a live algorithm question now. I guess one upside of these types of interviews is I've been able to disqualify candidates just because I don't like them and saying they didn't do well on the algorithm question as justification is a easy way to reject them without much explanation. And what about every other field that doesn't use leetcode style interviews? Does a biotech company make their interviewees do lab work live? What makes software engineering so special that we need a different interview process?
- Aunche 5y ago
  It's very rare that people intend to be racist. Rather, they have intuition of what a "good programmer" is in their head, which is subjective, and thus more likely to be discriminatory. If you give them an leetcode question and a rubric to grade their performance, it's hard to deviate from that rubric to much unless if you're intending to discriminate. >Does a biotech company make their interviewees do lab work live? Not biotech, but according to my cousin, pharmaceutical research interviews are even more arbitrary. He had chat with 5 employees who asked questions about their own rather esoteric specialties. Most of the questions were completely unrelated to the work that he ended up doing, and my cousin thought that the interviewers themselves were unlikely to be able to answer each other's questions. Unlike leetcode, this isn't something you can predictably study. It just so happened that the labs my cousin had worked in happened to specialize in those same niches. There are so many qualified postdocs that want to move to industry that interviewers can afford to be picky.
  - biztos 5y ago
    This is probably very dated, but when I worked in biotech the interview process was just about 100% trying to find a "culture fit" (to be fair, in an industry about a thousand times more diverse than software) and politics. If the hiring manager brought someone in then you assumed it was on them to have screened for competence, and you wanted to figure out which candidate you'd like to work with, and/or figure out which candidate was favored by which person in power so you could vote advantageously.
ryandvm 5y ago
If leetcode is intended to avoid discrimination, in my opinion it fails miserably. As the parent poster mentioned, it certainly rules out people that don't have the resources to study, but it also rules out another class of people prone to panic disorders. I'll share my leetcode horror story to illustrate. At the time, I had been coding for 15 years in multiple languages. Out of the blue I got poked by a Facebook recruiter and on a lark decided to go through the process. I made it through the phone calls and screen-share coding sessions just fine. I went onsite and had a several interviews that went swimmingly. Then near the end of the day, I ended up getting a whiteboard coding challenge that involved pretty simple array manipulation and my brain absolutely locked up. In retrospect it was comical, but at the time it was incredibly humiliating. There I was just alternately staring at the whiteboard and the interviewer with what I can only imagine to be the most hopeless expression. My brain fog absolutely impenetrable. At this point in my life, I'm fairly familiar with the condition. Basically for some random reason, the thought pops into your head just how disastrous it would be if you failed at this thing you're being asked to do. Then your consciousness inevitably becomes obsessed with this thought and it's all you can think about. You start panicking and soon you have absolutely zero mental bandwidth to accomplish the task and your mind is basically singularly focused with getting out of this terrible situation. It sucks. So, I'm always a little annoyed when I hear people say, "what's the big deal with a little leetcode?" I mean, I get it, if I actually could not solve those problems, I would not be eligible for the job. But the reality of whiteboard leetcode is that you're not screening for people that can code, you're screening out people that can have panic attacks. In my opinion, it is borderline disability discrimination.
- comprev 5y ago
  I experienced this recently in a surprise 'shared screen' coding exercise the interviewers threw in at the last minute. I couldn't even remember how to write a for loop in bash, something so familiar it would be like asking me to recite the alphabet. Utterly humiliating yet comical experience looking back.
  - d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
    If it makes you feel any better, I can never remember BASH syntax. I have a gist where I keep all the common junk like for loops and array manipulation. Never had that problem in other languages as I can generally remember after 3 or 4 repetitions but my brain just can't grasp BASH syntax.
toss1 5y ago
In the context of the parent comment which described how leetcode-style interviews are discriminatory, you have just nicely described nicely why the leetcode-style interviews are because companies are afraid of APPEARING discriminatory in hiring, and provided other methods of plausibly-deniable discrimination. If they want to be really undiscriminatory, the interviewer and interviewee need to not be able to see each other, and even real names (which can indicate gender and ethnicity) must be hidden. When orchestras started doing auditions with candidates anonymous and behind screens, they ended up hiring a LOT more women and minorities - even when the selection committees had previously thought they were trying to be nondiscriminatory. Deeply embedded biases are really hard to root out, even for ourselves.
- willcipriano 5y ago
  > When orchestras started doing auditions with candidates anonymous and behind screens, they ended up hiring a LOT more women and minorities The number of women increased, not so much the number of minorities[0]. [0]https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-auditions-orchestras-race.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...
TimTheTinker 5y ago
I think the problem here is that any criteria you use to choose one person over another is discriminatory -- that's the dictionary definition of discrimination: the choice between multiple competing options. The problem isn't discrimination, it's unfair discrimination -- that is, discrimination on the basis of something that should have no bearing on a decision to employ someone. Any criteria you choose will rule out people who aren't able to optimize for those criteria for whatever reason. I believe that's OK, as long as you are aware of the tradeoffs and try as much as possible, in good faith, to minimize unfair criteria while maintaining those criteria that help you hire people who have the best ability (or potential ability) to do the job.
TrinaryWorksToo 5y ago
Like anytime you're evaluating someone's compentency, find out what they view as a good example of their work and judge on that. Don't stick to any standardized hiring process, instead get to a burden of proof.
lhorie 5y ago
Interviews are, by definition, a way to discriminate candidates based on some criteria (using the dictionary meaning of word here). There are certain classes that are illegal to discriminate against (e.g. religion, ethnicity), but things like education are totally fair game. Airlines, for example, use physical fitness as a discrimination criteria under the rationale that a flight attendant must be able to function in the rare event of an emergency. Just because a criteria doesn't match one's notion of "fairness" doesn't mean it's inherently a bad criteria. If Google wants to only hire people that are good at cracking leetcode and that ultimately leads them to have their current reputation of being out of touch, that's kinda on them.
jackblemming 5y ago
https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-interviews-anxiety/ https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-interviews-anxiety/ Here's an actual study with real data. All women failed the leetcode challenge when grilled (probably by a man). They all passed when allowed to do it in a low stress environment.
fundad 5y ago
Yes it’s a substitution for practices that are illegal for the same reason we use the substitute. No need to be defensive about achieving intended results.

by snth 5y ago

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.
- binaryorganic 5y ago
  *their bosses.
  - throwaway2037 5y ago
    Thank you. I noticed this a lot on HN, but I don't know how to react. There is a common presumption that co-workers and managers will be men. It bothers me. I work in Asia where there are lots of talented women engineers. Each time I read one of those sentences, I do a double take!
    - brimble 5y ago
      I'm pretty sure most people over ~30 in the US were taught that was the correct form. Common usage has changed only very recently. At any rate, as long as using the feminine is fine, so's using the masculine. Some writers even use both, switching between them. Me, I much prefer the singular-they, because I don't think keeping masculine the standard is tenable or desirable, and I find writing that uses the feminine harder to read (because there's a vast body of existing writing that defaults to masculine and it's by far the bulk of all material I've read in my life, so if I see a feminine pronoun it throws me off for a second as my brain reflexively starts to try to figure out who exactly we're talking about—this is getting better as the practice is wider-spread, but c'mon, let's just use the singular-they) and because it doesn't tend to generate discussion about pronoun choice. [EDIT] fixed a mis-labeling.
  - willcipriano 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_languages_with_gendered_third-person_pronouns#Generic_he https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_languages...
    - culturestate 5y ago
      This strikes me as one of those linguistic squabbles - along with changing the definition of literally to include figuratively - where we just need to accept that language evolves, and usages that may be historically correct aren’t necessarily justifiable in a modern context.
snth 5y ago
> 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. I personally like take-home problems. It's hard for an employer to time-box them without resorting to basically leetcode though. I know that, as a student, I definitely spent many hours on them.
mabub24 5y ago
> Giving everyone the same coding interview is one of the most effective ways to remove interviewer bias. I'm sympathetic to the hiring side argument. But, I don't think the parent comment is insinuating that no technical question or test be asked of the applicant. They're not insisting on trust, they're insisting on showing their own intelligence. They're saying that the test or technical question should be directly applicable to the job at hand, for the company at hand. You can just as easily ask every single person who applies the same specific questions for the role at hand in your company. You don't need to rely on generic leetcode questions if they don't specifically apply to the job at hand. In other words, hiring needs to actually be specific and targeted rather than adopting the "cast a wide net and catch whatever we can" strategy that many places seem to employ. 9/10 it feels like the insistence on leetcode from hiring comes as an excuse for rather weak recruiting standards and practices.
throwaway2037 5y ago
Ace Greenberg from Bear Stearns (former US investment bank) used to say the trouble with hiring friends and family: "You get 100% of the dummies." Sure, you get a few good ones, but you also get the lousy ones.
rebeccaskinner 5y ago
> We know LeetCode style tests aren’t perfect, but they’re repeatable and the study material is free and widely available. One of the things that gets me here on the hiring side is that the ease of “grinding leetcode” as a strategy seems to defeat the entire purpose of it as an interview question. I don’t want to dismiss the value of someone being able to study a skill and learn it, but I see a lot of people fixated on rehearsing leetcode answers like they were magical incantations you recite to get jobs, there’s not always a lot of real learning happening. That’s not reflective of the kind of candidates I’d want to hire or the peers I’d want to work with. > A lot of companies give the option of LeetCode style interviews or take-homes and almost everybody chooses the take-home. If true I’d like to see more of this. No hiring process is good for everyone and I think flexibility can be a better way to make a process fair, but I haven’t seen much of it personally. I don’t think I’ve personally gotten a leetcode problem at an interview in years- takehome problems have been the more common screening tool, but I don’t think I’ve ever been offered a choice in the matter. > 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. I’m not sure this is entirely on the mark. On problem with takehome a is asymmetry. Most take home assignments I’ve gotten have come toward the end of an interview process, and there fine, but when I talk to more Junior folks it seems like they are often given hours long takehome problems before they ever talk to a human. That seems disrespectful of peoples time- it’s a lot to ask from someone who doesn’t even know if they are a fit or want your job yet. In any case the hours long takehome is usually in addition to an bourse long set of interviews- not in lieu of them. Another common problem pre-Covid was that a lot of people just weren’t set up to work from home so it was harder to get the space and time to work on a project at home. I expect that’s probably changed a lot these days though.
- brimble 5y ago
  > One of the things that gets me here on the hiring side is that the ease of “grinding leetcode” as a strategy seems to defeat the entire purpose of it as an interview question. I think that's irrelevant for FAANG and friends. They pay so high that they can afford to make their interviews so miserable and time-intensive to prepare for that tons of people never even try, purely as a first-pass filter. They don't care that you can prep for it, they just want it to be (exactly the right amount of) scary and unpleasant. The resulting, self-selected group probably is, in fact, far better on average than the set of all software developers, including those who never apply to those sorts of jobs (but might if the interviews were less awful). Furthermore I think that's why some results show that they could randomly select candidates and do about as well as the interview process does—sure, maybe, but they could not do that if the set of people applying wasn't already heavily biased to have a fairly high average skill level (& IQ, that's absolutely part of what they're filtering for). Now, companies paying half or less what FAANG does and trying to do anything remotely similar, are simply making a mistake. People with a tolerance for and ability to pass those kinds of interviews are going to apply to the much-higher-paying options, not to your company.
fallingknife 5y ago
The issue with take homes is that they are at the beginning of the process where you might have hundreds of candidates. I won't invest several hours in that. Whereas on-sites are the last stage in the process, so it's better than 50-50 that I'll get an offer out of it. So in that case I'm happy to take the time.
mattkrause 5y ago
Leetcode or "just trust me" feels like a false dichotomy. Biotech interviews, for example, are usually conversational: what have you worked on before[0], how would you tackle this new problem, or troubleshoot a particular problem. There's this persistent meme that charlatans can BS their way though such an interview, but I really don't see how someone could learn enough to parrot their way through 4-5 x 45 minute meetings, often with fairly probing questions. It felt quite a bit like a thesis defense, in fact. It's true that these aren't "repeatable": each applicant won't have exactly the same experience. This is "unbiased", in a sense[1], but has enormous variance: you're not only testing the applicant's aptitude, but also whether they've encountered this particular problem before. OTOH, tailoring the interview to each applicant' strengths might inject a little bias in exchange for a massive reduction in variance. [0] It does help that candidates for these jobs had masters/PhDs, and therefore had at least one project they could discuss publicly. [1] But not really...There's a subjective element to "code quality", fluency, whether the applicant wrote "enough" tests, etc.
- deeg 5y ago
  My guess (I have no experience in the biotech industry) is that this is largely because you can't run an hour-long experiment with the candidate to test their competence. They must rely on a conversational technique. I don't know how much we can compare software with other industries. The software industry is unique (or so we think) in that we can directly test a candidate to judge their competency in an hour, either by white-boarding or going over a take-home problem (or similar).
  - brimble 5y ago
    Plenty of other industries could come up with barely-related-to-your-day-job stealth-IQ/how-bad-do-you-want-this test, but don't.
  - notch656a 5y ago
    I don't think that's accurate. The most effective hiring process I've been through is one where there was basically no interview, I was given contract work to perform during which I was compensated for necessary company tasks with no real expectation of enduring relationship. After a few days of performing tasks to the satisfaction of the company, I was offered a permanent position. Not only did this process eliminate the BS, it allowed me to perform a task in a relatively low-pressure but high yield setting while simultaneously not exploiting me (I got paid) and allowed the employer to see how I would actually behave as an employee. This is also the longest and most successful position I've held, partially because there is no lingering bitterness and hatefulness I've harbored at those expecting me to solve bullshit problems for free, like some kind of performing monkey.

aw9f70gae 5y ago

In that case couldn’t you give an automated test that more pertains to the job requirements and the applicants’ prior experience?

dahfizz 5y ago
Giving each applicant a tailored test also opens yourself to allegations of discrimination. As for leet code vs an actually relevant test - I think this is probably laziness on the interviewer's part. Coming up with a good test (and keeping it up to date) is hard, and leet code questions are "good enough" to filter out the people who don't know what they are doing. Remember, most companies are fine with a high false negative rate if it keeps false positives low.
- notch656a 5y ago
  Is discrimination even illegal? I thought unless it was a protected class, discrimination is ok. Unless you're giving all black people a shittier test or something I feel like it's a long and expensive road ahead of someone pursuing legal action, with probably not much to gain and no attorney particularly interested unless it is some class action against a big company.
  - dahfizz 5y ago
    > I thought unless it was a protected class, discrimination is ok. That is also my understanding, but everyone except young white males are in a protected class. Granted, young white males are pretty common in tech, but you would still be wise to design your HR practices in such a way as to avoid lawsuits.
    - notch656a 5y ago
      Agreed it would be wise to consider lawsuits when hiring. I do think though that's only one part of the equation. What you want to really optimize for is maximizing profit. Maximized profit may mean paying out lawsuits is cheaper than losing good candidates or implementing a poor or ineffective hiring process. There's also the risk of implementing a hiring process for which the expense of minimizing lawsuits is greater than the potential lawsuits themselves.

vsareto 5y ago

>what can you do? We need a credential that counts as passing a technical interview, so we don't have to take these tests for every single job that we apply to. If I pass a coding test, stay at a company for a year, then apply to other companies, I'm going to subjected to coding tests even though I just passed one only a year ago. It's like companies are afraid that programmers will spontaneously forget how to program. A credential's test is not limited by the very time constrained format of interviews. This means it could ask more questions to reduce false positives. People would be willing to invest time because it saves them the hassle of interviews in the future. A centralized testing entity could work to reduce cheating instead of every company having to do that themselves. Plus, administering this test would be full time jobs for folks, so it would likely be a higher quality test than what most companies give.

adbachman 5y ago
> We need a credential that counts as passing a technical interview This idea already exists in many forms. Pick any language, platform, or technical concept and there's someone offering training and certification. It also describes the whole recruiting industry. "What if there was one person who did a lot of interviews and then presented just the best people to employers?" It's an extremely human incentive alignment problem. Any certification program, interview farm, or bootcamp that makes more money when they produce more candidates will make quantity the goal, not quality. If you can figure out that problem, maybe there's a niche. Otherwise, it puts us right where we already are.
- vsareto 5y ago
  The trainings and certifications won't let you bypass technical interviews though. There's still inherent distrust of them. We need a credential good enough that companies can trust. Most of the recruiters I deal with are only doing screens and maybe soft interviews -- I may be on the lower rungs of the ladder here though. For the last point, I'll offer Offensive Security as an example because I have one of their certs. OS wants people in its programs as we're a source of income, obviously, but they don't get revenue from people passing. In fact, they get more revenue if you don't pass because they charge per attempt. They offer training for organizations too. They also act as a verification service for their certifications: https://help.offensive-security.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040160152-How-do-I-verify-someone-s-certification-or-how-can-I-have-my-certification-verified- https://help.offensive-security.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040... The idea for a programming credential would be the same: an organization that offers training, doesn't make money on pass rates, and also is a trusted point of verification. Some companies have offered to do technical interviews, then pass you to employers. This is a start, but it isn't industry wide.

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nebula8804 5y ago

Wait isn't it only illegal to consider Race/religion/sexual orientation? Have these other criteria become officially illegal or just a possible lawsuit? I can't see how any company looking to build a good team wouldn't consider culture fit. One bad hire could tank a team so I'd imagine they are very cautious?

mattkrause 5y ago
Age (>40) and family status are definitely on the list as well.
- throwaway2037 5y ago
  I assume you are referring to United States employment law? For others: https://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination https://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Age Discrimination: <<The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) forbids age discrimination against people who are age 40 or older. It does not protect workers under the age of 40, although some states have laws that protect younger workers from age discrimination.>>
  - mattkrause 5y ago
    Yes, but it's similar in Canada and Germany* too. * German academia has some incredibly stupid rules related to time-since-graduation, but age per se is a protected class.
thesuitonym 5y ago
What's legal varies by location, but even if it's not illegal to discriminate against the other criteria in the GP's list, a company may consider those factors and try to avoid that discrimination anyway. After all, you want the best candidate, regardless of what their home life is like.
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
It's illegal to use proxy metrics that impact a protected class more than others. This is to prevent companies from discriminating by hiding behind tests whose main purpose isn't to match on skills needed for the job but to filter out members of protected classes. An employer can prohibit the wearing of a turban if it is a legitimate safety hazard. They can't prohibit it if the purpose is to ensure no Sikhs get hired. What's the purpose of leetcode? Does it map directly to a job's primary task or is it a way of filtering out certain protected classes such as those of an older age?

managerclass 5y ago

If the true purpose of algorithm tests was to be non-discriminatory, the interview and interviewee should not be able to see each other, their voices should be masked to hide nationality/accent, and resumes should not be viewed when solving the problems. I assure you I can still discriminate against a candidate both consciously and subconsciously during a live algorithm question now. I guess one upside of these types of interviews is I've been able to disqualify candidates just because I don't like them and saying they didn't do well on the algorithm question as justification is a easy way to reject them without much explanation. And what about every other field that doesn't use leetcode style interviews? Does a biotech company make their interviewees do lab work live? What makes software engineering so special that we need a different interview process?

Aunche 5y ago
It's very rare that people intend to be racist. Rather, they have intuition of what a "good programmer" is in their head, which is subjective, and thus more likely to be discriminatory. If you give them an leetcode question and a rubric to grade their performance, it's hard to deviate from that rubric to much unless if you're intending to discriminate. >Does a biotech company make their interviewees do lab work live? Not biotech, but according to my cousin, pharmaceutical research interviews are even more arbitrary. He had chat with 5 employees who asked questions about their own rather esoteric specialties. Most of the questions were completely unrelated to the work that he ended up doing, and my cousin thought that the interviewers themselves were unlikely to be able to answer each other's questions. Unlike leetcode, this isn't something you can predictably study. It just so happened that the labs my cousin had worked in happened to specialize in those same niches. There are so many qualified postdocs that want to move to industry that interviewers can afford to be picky.
- biztos 5y ago
  This is probably very dated, but when I worked in biotech the interview process was just about 100% trying to find a "culture fit" (to be fair, in an industry about a thousand times more diverse than software) and politics. If the hiring manager brought someone in then you assumed it was on them to have screened for competence, and you wanted to figure out which candidate you'd like to work with, and/or figure out which candidate was favored by which person in power so you could vote advantageously.

ryandvm 5y ago

If leetcode is intended to avoid discrimination, in my opinion it fails miserably. As the parent poster mentioned, it certainly rules out people that don't have the resources to study, but it also rules out another class of people prone to panic disorders. I'll share my leetcode horror story to illustrate. At the time, I had been coding for 15 years in multiple languages. Out of the blue I got poked by a Facebook recruiter and on a lark decided to go through the process. I made it through the phone calls and screen-share coding sessions just fine. I went onsite and had a several interviews that went swimmingly. Then near the end of the day, I ended up getting a whiteboard coding challenge that involved pretty simple array manipulation and my brain absolutely locked up. In retrospect it was comical, but at the time it was incredibly humiliating. There I was just alternately staring at the whiteboard and the interviewer with what I can only imagine to be the most hopeless expression. My brain fog absolutely impenetrable. At this point in my life, I'm fairly familiar with the condition. Basically for some random reason, the thought pops into your head just how disastrous it would be if you failed at this thing you're being asked to do. Then your consciousness inevitably becomes obsessed with this thought and it's all you can think about. You start panicking and soon you have absolutely zero mental bandwidth to accomplish the task and your mind is basically singularly focused with getting out of this terrible situation. It sucks. So, I'm always a little annoyed when I hear people say, "what's the big deal with a little leetcode?" I mean, I get it, if I actually could not solve those problems, I would not be eligible for the job. But the reality of whiteboard leetcode is that you're not screening for people that can code, you're screening out people that can have panic attacks. In my opinion, it is borderline disability discrimination.

comprev 5y ago
I experienced this recently in a surprise 'shared screen' coding exercise the interviewers threw in at the last minute. I couldn't even remember how to write a for loop in bash, something so familiar it would be like asking me to recite the alphabet. Utterly humiliating yet comical experience looking back.
- d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
  If it makes you feel any better, I can never remember BASH syntax. I have a gist where I keep all the common junk like for loops and array manipulation. Never had that problem in other languages as I can generally remember after 3 or 4 repetitions but my brain just can't grasp BASH syntax.

toss1 5y ago

In the context of the parent comment which described how leetcode-style interviews are discriminatory, you have just nicely described nicely why the leetcode-style interviews are because companies are afraid of APPEARING discriminatory in hiring, and provided other methods of plausibly-deniable discrimination. If they want to be really undiscriminatory, the interviewer and interviewee need to not be able to see each other, and even real names (which can indicate gender and ethnicity) must be hidden. When orchestras started doing auditions with candidates anonymous and behind screens, they ended up hiring a LOT more women and minorities - even when the selection committees had previously thought they were trying to be nondiscriminatory. Deeply embedded biases are really hard to root out, even for ourselves.

willcipriano 5y ago
> When orchestras started doing auditions with candidates anonymous and behind screens, they ended up hiring a LOT more women and minorities The number of women increased, not so much the number of minorities[0]. [0]https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-auditions-orchestras-race.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...

TimTheTinker 5y ago

I think the problem here is that any criteria you use to choose one person over another is discriminatory -- that's the dictionary definition of discrimination: the choice between multiple competing options. The problem isn't discrimination, it's unfair discrimination -- that is, discrimination on the basis of something that should have no bearing on a decision to employ someone. Any criteria you choose will rule out people who aren't able to optimize for those criteria for whatever reason. I believe that's OK, as long as you are aware of the tradeoffs and try as much as possible, in good faith, to minimize unfair criteria while maintaining those criteria that help you hire people who have the best ability (or potential ability) to do the job.

TrinaryWorksToo 5y ago

Like anytime you're evaluating someone's compentency, find out what they view as a good example of their work and judge on that. Don't stick to any standardized hiring process, instead get to a burden of proof.

lhorie 5y ago

Interviews are, by definition, a way to discriminate candidates based on some criteria (using the dictionary meaning of word here). There are certain classes that are illegal to discriminate against (e.g. religion, ethnicity), but things like education are totally fair game. Airlines, for example, use physical fitness as a discrimination criteria under the rationale that a flight attendant must be able to function in the rare event of an emergency. Just because a criteria doesn't match one's notion of "fairness" doesn't mean it's inherently a bad criteria. If Google wants to only hire people that are good at cracking leetcode and that ultimately leads them to have their current reputation of being out of touch, that's kinda on them.

jackblemming 5y ago

https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-interviews-anxiety/ https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-interviews-anxiety/ Here's an actual study with real data. All women failed the leetcode challenge when grilled (probably by a man). They all passed when allowed to do it in a low stress environment.

fundad 5y ago

Yes it’s a substitution for practices that are illegal for the same reason we use the substitute. No need to be defensive about achieving intended results.