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I’ve passed almost every interview loop I’ve had without ever studying leetcode. I have a (maybe uncharitable) suspicion that people who find they need to study

I’ve passed almost every interview loop I’ve had without ever studying leetcode. I have a (maybe uncharitable) suspicion that people who find they need to study are spending all their time at work gluing software together without actually writing any from scratch.

Apocryphon 5y ago
Seems like most of the industry is made up of such roles these days.
saagarjha 5y ago
(Speaking as someone who uses theoretical computer science fairly often) I wonder what the solution to this would be, honestly. It seems like there are a lot of jobs where we just expect that gluing things together is an acceptable, productive, necessary task to be done. Should we interview for these differently? Can we avoid a stigma being attached to this (productive) work?
- erik_seaberg 5y ago
  I think we should automate this work away, or at least figure out what’s preventing that. Boilerplate is a problem, not a good investment of human effort.
rakejake 5y ago
Knowing the data structures and algorithms is different from actually passing these interviews. Interviews are designed in a way that you are going to have to commit a lot of stuff to memory that you would have just looked up if you were just coding up a problem. A common example brought up here on HN is binary search. It is usually simple to figure out that a problem requires Binary search and even which variant. But the differences between the variant are really small and you can very easily make a mistake when implementing it. I have passed enough of these interviews myself and used to think similarly (all you need to do is learn the fundamentals and the rest will follow) but my hit rate went up substantially when I realized that I had to do the same problem again and again and it almost became part of my muscle memory. Looking at a new problem, analyzing it and then coming up with a novel solution takes a lot of time, and there are several mistakes you can make on the way. The interviewing culture today is to reject "false positives" so anything apart from a perfectly coded response results in a mixed/negative response. This whole leetcode thing is a farce and has to end. Let's be honest, the Google guys used it because they wanted "like-minded people". In short, they discriminated based on their own criteria and successfully brushed it off as a "fair and unbiased" way of selecting people.

Apocryphon 5y ago

Seems like most of the industry is made up of such roles these days.

saagarjha 5y ago

(Speaking as someone who uses theoretical computer science fairly often) I wonder what the solution to this would be, honestly. It seems like there are a lot of jobs where we just expect that gluing things together is an acceptable, productive, necessary task to be done. Should we interview for these differently? Can we avoid a stigma being attached to this (productive) work?

erik_seaberg 5y ago
I think we should automate this work away, or at least figure out what’s preventing that. Boilerplate is a problem, not a good investment of human effort.

rakejake 5y ago

Knowing the data structures and algorithms is different from actually passing these interviews. Interviews are designed in a way that you are going to have to commit a lot of stuff to memory that you would have just looked up if you were just coding up a problem. A common example brought up here on HN is binary search. It is usually simple to figure out that a problem requires Binary search and even which variant. But the differences between the variant are really small and you can very easily make a mistake when implementing it. I have passed enough of these interviews myself and used to think similarly (all you need to do is learn the fundamentals and the rest will follow) but my hit rate went up substantially when I realized that I had to do the same problem again and again and it almost became part of my muscle memory. Looking at a new problem, analyzing it and then coming up with a novel solution takes a lot of time, and there are several mistakes you can make on the way. The interviewing culture today is to reject "false positives" so anything apart from a perfectly coded response results in a mixed/negative response. This whole leetcode thing is a farce and has to end. Let's be honest, the Google guys used it because they wanted "like-minded people". In short, they discriminated based on their own criteria and successfully brushed it off as a "fair and unbiased" way of selecting people.