6 ms·

Ask HN: Good ways to weed out people who fixate on grinding LeetCode?

6 points by Sincere 5y ago

devKnight 5y ago
Asking open ended questions, is where you can really gauge people. ie: What was the toughest coding problem you had to deal with at your last/current job? Tell me about the last time you needed to ask for help with a coding issue, where you had exhausted all options on your end? etc etc Edit: I help with hiring at the company i work at, and i like using open ended questions
- efortis 5y ago
  Past and test projects are good as well. I'm not against open ended questions, but making them should be a privilege the boss grants to well-intentioned employees.
- muzani 5y ago
  Like all good tests, they should also come prepared with a fail condition. I think most of these are just icebreakers - as long as you say something, you pass. So they tend to pass anyone who just "feels good". That biases it towards people who are good talkers. Sure, communication is a point. But sometimes, you interview someone in another time zone where it's 9 PM or 6 AM or before a lunch break after an exhausting half day. They'd just answer something dumb like, "Uhhh, if I was stuck and needed help, I'll ask...?" There's also people who are bad at spoken English, or have some mental block - have difficulty talking on zoom with camera on/off. There are those desperately need the job and end up using "safe" LinkedIn talk, where they refuse to badmouth the people who killed the last project, and refuse to admit that it was also partially their fault, so they just end up sounding sus. I'd say the way around this is to ask something that's partially open ended. Like "How would you solve this problem?"
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
LeetCode problems are a small portion of technical interviews at any reasonable company, but it’s not the entirety of the interview. Nobody I’ve ever interviewed with has used LeetCode style problems as the only factor. You need to create a hiring process that has a multi-faceted interview process and evaluates the person’s entire work history, abilities, and communication during the interview.
- quantified 5y ago
  A major (Super Bowl advertising) SaaS vendor sprang a single Leetcode interview on me after an informal discussion with a VP, it was introduced as “have a chat with senior engineers”. I take 30 mins to solve it. The company they ghosted me, despite my having 3 former colleagues in the same division I was interviewing in. Eventually one of my former colleagues divines that they were disappointed it took me that long. Definitely happens. Checked my solution at Leetcode, top 5% of performance in Java.
  - raincom 5y ago
    That's sad, given at least three former colleagues can vouch for you. Even if you had finished that question in an hour, they should have considered you for the job.
  - b20000 5y ago
    just say no and go do something else.
- b20000 5y ago
  i have gone through multiple coding interviews recently and didn’t get hired dispite being a semi celebrity in my niche and having brought multiple succesful products to market which i did all the development for. leetcode is all that is paid attention to in FAANGs.
dominotw 5y ago
uhh..by not asking leetcode questions?
- b20000 5y ago
  exactly
muzani 5y ago
I find a 30 min technical interview really weeds them out. Ask them what they think about so and so technology that they put on their resume. "Why do you prefer MVVM over MVC? What's your experience with Jetpack? Why did you migrate code over to Jetpack over something like RxJava? You put TDD on your resume, is there any reason you prefer that over just writing tests on completed code? You mentioned functional programming on your resume, but why didn't you put a map() here?" These questions are basically fizzbuzz for those who have done the work. But you'd be surprised how many people do things for absolutely no reason. The downside is people tend to hire them anyway when they flunk the technical interview but have excellent leetcode score. One is fairly subjective, the other is objective, and people tend to lean towards the subjective one. You can work around this by having two technical interviewers, but they have to be fairly senior enough to trust.
- b20000 5y ago
  so do you think people lie on their resume? if you think they do, keep this bias in mind.
  - muzani 5y ago
    On a skill rating of 1-20, I'd say most resume items are 2-6. It's fine. Unless you're FAANG or a higher tier startup, you're not going to get applicants with over a 15. Most of the time, you hire someone with a 4 and take them to 9. The scale is fairly logarithmic, like a 8 might be 10 times better than a 3. 1 is hello world, 2 is being able to debug something with stack overflow, 3 is your fizzbuzz tier of being able to chain three concepts together, but not able to build anything without help. And then there's the Dunning-Kruger peak. Most evangelists are like this. They're very excited for a technology, but you find that they have no practical skill in it. Very often, they misunderstand the concepts too.
    - b20000 5y ago
      your attitude indicates everything that is wrong with interviewing.
b20000 5y ago
ask them to show their personal coding projects. people who grind leetcode have none. because leetcode eats up all their time.

6 points by Sincere 5y ago

Asking open ended questions, is where you can really gauge people. ie: What was the toughest coding problem you had to deal with at your last/current job? Tell me about the last time you needed to ask for help with a coding issue, where you had exhausted all options on your end? etc etc Edit: I help with hiring at the company i work at, and i like using open ended questions

efortis 5y ago
Past and test projects are good as well. I'm not against open ended questions, but making them should be a privilege the boss grants to well-intentioned employees.
muzani 5y ago
Like all good tests, they should also come prepared with a fail condition. I think most of these are just icebreakers - as long as you say something, you pass. So they tend to pass anyone who just "feels good". That biases it towards people who are good talkers. Sure, communication is a point. But sometimes, you interview someone in another time zone where it's 9 PM or 6 AM or before a lunch break after an exhausting half day. They'd just answer something dumb like, "Uhhh, if I was stuck and needed help, I'll ask...?" There's also people who are bad at spoken English, or have some mental block - have difficulty talking on zoom with camera on/off. There are those desperately need the job and end up using "safe" LinkedIn talk, where they refuse to badmouth the people who killed the last project, and refuse to admit that it was also partially their fault, so they just end up sounding sus. I'd say the way around this is to ask something that's partially open ended. Like "How would you solve this problem?"

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

LeetCode problems are a small portion of technical interviews at any reasonable company, but it’s not the entirety of the interview. Nobody I’ve ever interviewed with has used LeetCode style problems as the only factor. You need to create a hiring process that has a multi-faceted interview process and evaluates the person’s entire work history, abilities, and communication during the interview.

quantified 5y ago
A major (Super Bowl advertising) SaaS vendor sprang a single Leetcode interview on me after an informal discussion with a VP, it was introduced as “have a chat with senior engineers”. I take 30 mins to solve it. The company they ghosted me, despite my having 3 former colleagues in the same division I was interviewing in. Eventually one of my former colleagues divines that they were disappointed it took me that long. Definitely happens. Checked my solution at Leetcode, top 5% of performance in Java.
- raincom 5y ago
  That's sad, given at least three former colleagues can vouch for you. Even if you had finished that question in an hour, they should have considered you for the job.
- b20000 5y ago
  just say no and go do something else.
b20000 5y ago
i have gone through multiple coding interviews recently and didn’t get hired dispite being a semi celebrity in my niche and having brought multiple succesful products to market which i did all the development for. leetcode is all that is paid attention to in FAANGs.

dominotw 5y ago

uhh..by not asking leetcode questions?

b20000 5y ago
exactly

muzani 5y ago

I find a 30 min technical interview really weeds them out. Ask them what they think about so and so technology that they put on their resume. "Why do you prefer MVVM over MVC? What's your experience with Jetpack? Why did you migrate code over to Jetpack over something like RxJava? You put TDD on your resume, is there any reason you prefer that over just writing tests on completed code? You mentioned functional programming on your resume, but why didn't you put a map() here?" These questions are basically fizzbuzz for those who have done the work. But you'd be surprised how many people do things for absolutely no reason. The downside is people tend to hire them anyway when they flunk the technical interview but have excellent leetcode score. One is fairly subjective, the other is objective, and people tend to lean towards the subjective one. You can work around this by having two technical interviewers, but they have to be fairly senior enough to trust.

b20000 5y ago
so do you think people lie on their resume? if you think they do, keep this bias in mind.
- muzani 5y ago
  On a skill rating of 1-20, I'd say most resume items are 2-6. It's fine. Unless you're FAANG or a higher tier startup, you're not going to get applicants with over a 15. Most of the time, you hire someone with a 4 and take them to 9. The scale is fairly logarithmic, like a 8 might be 10 times better than a 3. 1 is hello world, 2 is being able to debug something with stack overflow, 3 is your fizzbuzz tier of being able to chain three concepts together, but not able to build anything without help. And then there's the Dunning-Kruger peak. Most evangelists are like this. They're very excited for a technology, but you find that they have no practical skill in it. Very often, they misunderstand the concepts too.
  - b20000 5y ago
    your attitude indicates everything that is wrong with interviewing.

b20000 5y ago

ask them to show their personal coding projects. people who grind leetcode have none. because leetcode eats up all their time.