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I used to hate leetcode-style coding interviews, but now I don't. The reason for this is a comment from a Google engineer. That comment changed my mind. In that

I used to hate leetcode-style coding interviews, but now I don't. The reason for this is a comment from a Google engineer. That comment changed my mind. In that comment they explained the motivation behind asking these type of questions and it all finally clicked for me. Corporations are not testing your knowledge of algorithms per se. While that knowledge is obviously important, what's more important is how dedicated you are when it comes to reaching a goal. Essentially, they are testing your will power. You know the rules. Can you achieve success and not give up in the middle of the road by skipping, say, Dynamic Programming? They could've tested your level of dedication by asking to bake some fancy cake, but throwing CS-related questions just makes much more sense. That reasoning completely changed my perspective about algo-heavy coding interviews.

jackblemming 4y ago
Maybe I’d prefer to not dance like a monkey for employment.
- ta988 4y ago
  Some people are ready to trade dancing for a lot of money and a resume that will open them the doors of where you really want to be.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    Are they the people you want to hire?
    - ta988 4y ago
      In my place? Absolutely not, but we designed the interview process to try to avoid that.
slyall 4y ago
Sure, but just make sure you are Google before you try this. If you are a no-name company paying whatever your HR department defines as "market rate" and you don't get hundreds of very qualified candidates for every role then interviewing like Google might not be a great idea.
ta988 4y ago
They are testing also how docile you are. If you are ready to do useless tasks and go through hundreds of pages of the X-corp way of life then you have a chance to stay long and prosper.
qz_kb 4y ago
How dedicated you are to do a task with no intrinsic value besides getting hired at companies with leetcode-style interviews. I don't think google is better off when everyone they hire has wasted hundreds of hours on a fundamentally useless skill rather than having used that time to learn different skills or just enjoy time with family and minimize the chance they burn out on the job at a later date. There's other ways to tease out if someone is "dedicated to reaching a goal" like actually asking them questions about their life, daily routine, accomplishments etc. I think these are much better signals than "this person can implement many sorting algorithms and solve towers of hanoi or the egg drop puzzle without a google search to refresh their memory" with an N=1 sample size used to gauge how reliably they can do that. How many people if asked to do this on a job rather than an interview a year later would then go and implement it from memory without double checking they didn't forget some edge case on stackoverflow? I know grinding leetcode is fundamentally useless because you will immediately start losing your ability to interview once you get hired. If you don't change jobs within a year you'll need to start studying all that crap again for the next interview.
- rektide 4y ago
  Yes, leetcode skills don't help every day. But I definitely enjoy & respect more fellow coders who have computational thinking skills, who can break down problems, who understand costs. That this isn't the bulk of what we do doesn't change the fact that these challenges do test computational thinking acuity. Having the ability to see & speak computationally is a good skill, one that connects our day-to-day abstract practice with actual real processes. Being able to break down problems & analyze how to tackle them shows an objective ability to assess & work through problems. I want to work with people who can be clear, who can model & explain & step through situations. And these skills are, generally, learnable, and relatively quickly. I disagree that these abilities fade, but yes, some re-familiarizing & re-training is probably important, especially because, as you point out, the sample size is indeed often N=1, and that's pretty wild.
- rvz 4y ago
  > How many people if asked to do this on a job rather than an interview a year later would then go and implement it from memory without double checking they didn't forget some edge case on stackoverflow? An excellent question. If the interviewer is to ask such algorithms questions looked up on leetcode, etc, then they must be prepared for when the candidate asks if they also use it themselves on the job. If the interviewer admits they don't use it, then they also admitted that they don't know what they are looking for and really are wasting the candidate's time. If it were me, I would look at open-source contributions (no hello-world or demo projects) where that is enough proof for me to evaluate an entry-level candidate and cut through the algorithms nonsense and ask questions to the candidate based on that which will save everyone time.
neilv 4y ago
> what's more important is how dedicated you are when it comes to reaching a goal. Essentially, they are testing your will power. You know the rules. Can you achieve success and not give up in the middle of the road by skipping, say, Dynamic Programming? That's an interesting theory. And they pick the goal that happens to be best suited to fresh/current undergrads from Stanford who weren't working a draining job to put themselves through school, so can afford the additional person-months to achieve the gatekeeping that was set up by people like them, for people like them. I and many other experienced software engineers have demonstrated perseverance and rising to the occasion of extremely challenging goals. But that theory suggests they're not interested in that. Maybe they're interested in the class shibboleth that was established when computers became less of a meritocracy for people with a passion for it, and more of a go-to status job for the upper middle class?
- rektide 4y ago
  The thing is, the practical field is littered with countless different technologies & endless subjective opinions. We'd need 3,000 different tests to test everyone's practical knowledge, to let them pick between. Oh, you use Go and SolidJS, here's a test for you... and who is going to be able to properly give you a score other than works/doesn't work? This person likes functional style but this person is more OO... the base truth is: code is artisinal & subjective 98% of the time. Most code is soft. There's poor metrics to assess & judge it by. Many many many things work. What we do is cultural, is social, is subjective. I'm not sure how to make this come through but I'm rather sympathetic. I think practical experience & can-do coder know-how count for most of the marbles. But I also think it's impressively hard to assess by, that most of what we do is just taste & path dependence on the specific techs we've seen that happened to leave good impressions on us: not science, not knowledge, not truth: most coding, most practice is almost entirely happenstance. But again I want to empathize. Because I think it's cruel to disregard engineers that have seen so much. But I also think you're hyperbolizing overmuch & discrediting the discourse when you make your argument so sharply pointedly. Because there's some truth, absolutely, but it's also no-where near as lopsided. For example, you talk about fresh/current undergrads at Stanford. But this is a pretty regular, basic CS path that any university student should be familiar with. I only had two undergrad classes that really talked to algorithms (Algorithms and then Data structures; OS kind of somewhat), albeit there was some computational thinking already in play at that point. Understanding complexity & algorithms is understanding the basics, it really is. If you can't see time flowing, don't know the tally & impact of the work you're asking for, you're lacking knowledge to avoid a lot of bad decisions. This isn't made up fake shit taught only to the elite. What's alluring about this system is that it has some hard facts & theory underneath it. It's not just opinion & engineering pop-culture. The answers don't change, the rules don't change, the material stays the same, and it's all rooted in being able to analyze and understand problems, rooted in comprehension. Being able to see & understand & analyze, being able to apply some basic principles: this is a pretty sure way to find people who will be able to Not Mess It Up, who are capable of looking, assessing, & navigating through scenarios computationally. And last and perhaps most key to me: it's also material that someone with even a modest bit of aptitude can cram for. Pick up a book like "Cracking the Coding Interview" and you can semi-accurately reproduce the output of four years of undergrad in two or three months of occasional light practice & trying. Projects like Leetcode can get you the experience. You may feel bad that what you want yourself to be measured on doesn't count here, but to people trying to go get hired, it's enormously helpful to them to have well defined expectations, to have specific kinds of tests to expect & be able to prepare & study for. I see so many protests that it's not fair, that it favors only those with the luxury of time, but those views to me massively undermine how wonderfully vastly accessible it is that there's a known, well-described, well-supported subject-area we can study. The industry overflows with things to learn, study, & know, but here's something concrete & specific, which undergirds it all, which alone might not determine your coding skill, but which does indicate you at least have some raw basic intellectual capacity to go understand problems put before you & apply some sensible computational thinking to tackling them. There's tons of things not tested for, but by having a well defined, technology-neutral set of computational thinking tests, based on actual science with objective, factual answers, rather a much wider corpus of future/current/legacy pop-engineering-of-the-day built on nothing but wishy-washy subjective opinion, I think we achieve one of the best possible wins we can against an enemy we both hate: class-based discrimination, cruel tests that reject outgroups.
Cd00d 4y ago
So, they're actually testing to see if you have commitments outside of work. "Great" filtering for parents or people caring for ailing family or any other non-work commitment. I guess it's not ageism at all, right?
hiyer 4y ago
> what's more important is how dedicated you are when it comes to reaching a goal. That may sound good in theory, but in practice I've been rejected quite a few times for not delivering the correct or most optimal solution despite trying my best.
alok-g 4y ago
I'll multiply that reasoning by a few orders of magnitude to show what's wrong with it. Would they hire Olympics winners for these positions?

jackblemming 4y ago

Maybe I’d prefer to not dance like a monkey for employment.

ta988 4y ago
Some people are ready to trade dancing for a lot of money and a resume that will open them the doors of where you really want to be.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Are they the people you want to hire?
  - ta988 4y ago
    In my place? Absolutely not, but we designed the interview process to try to avoid that.

slyall 4y ago

Sure, but just make sure you are Google before you try this. If you are a no-name company paying whatever your HR department defines as "market rate" and you don't get hundreds of very qualified candidates for every role then interviewing like Google might not be a great idea.

ta988 4y ago

They are testing also how docile you are. If you are ready to do useless tasks and go through hundreds of pages of the X-corp way of life then you have a chance to stay long and prosper.

qz_kb 4y ago

How dedicated you are to do a task with no intrinsic value besides getting hired at companies with leetcode-style interviews. I don't think google is better off when everyone they hire has wasted hundreds of hours on a fundamentally useless skill rather than having used that time to learn different skills or just enjoy time with family and minimize the chance they burn out on the job at a later date. There's other ways to tease out if someone is "dedicated to reaching a goal" like actually asking them questions about their life, daily routine, accomplishments etc. I think these are much better signals than "this person can implement many sorting algorithms and solve towers of hanoi or the egg drop puzzle without a google search to refresh their memory" with an N=1 sample size used to gauge how reliably they can do that. How many people if asked to do this on a job rather than an interview a year later would then go and implement it from memory without double checking they didn't forget some edge case on stackoverflow? I know grinding leetcode is fundamentally useless because you will immediately start losing your ability to interview once you get hired. If you don't change jobs within a year you'll need to start studying all that crap again for the next interview.

rektide 4y ago
Yes, leetcode skills don't help every day. But I definitely enjoy & respect more fellow coders who have computational thinking skills, who can break down problems, who understand costs. That this isn't the bulk of what we do doesn't change the fact that these challenges do test computational thinking acuity. Having the ability to see & speak computationally is a good skill, one that connects our day-to-day abstract practice with actual real processes. Being able to break down problems & analyze how to tackle them shows an objective ability to assess & work through problems. I want to work with people who can be clear, who can model & explain & step through situations. And these skills are, generally, learnable, and relatively quickly. I disagree that these abilities fade, but yes, some re-familiarizing & re-training is probably important, especially because, as you point out, the sample size is indeed often N=1, and that's pretty wild.
rvz 4y ago
> How many people if asked to do this on a job rather than an interview a year later would then go and implement it from memory without double checking they didn't forget some edge case on stackoverflow? An excellent question. If the interviewer is to ask such algorithms questions looked up on leetcode, etc, then they must be prepared for when the candidate asks if they also use it themselves on the job. If the interviewer admits they don't use it, then they also admitted that they don't know what they are looking for and really are wasting the candidate's time. If it were me, I would look at open-source contributions (no hello-world or demo projects) where that is enough proof for me to evaluate an entry-level candidate and cut through the algorithms nonsense and ask questions to the candidate based on that which will save everyone time.

neilv 4y ago

> what's more important is how dedicated you are when it comes to reaching a goal. Essentially, they are testing your will power. You know the rules. Can you achieve success and not give up in the middle of the road by skipping, say, Dynamic Programming? That's an interesting theory. And they pick the goal that happens to be best suited to fresh/current undergrads from Stanford who weren't working a draining job to put themselves through school, so can afford the additional person-months to achieve the gatekeeping that was set up by people like them, for people like them. I and many other experienced software engineers have demonstrated perseverance and rising to the occasion of extremely challenging goals. But that theory suggests they're not interested in that. Maybe they're interested in the class shibboleth that was established when computers became less of a meritocracy for people with a passion for it, and more of a go-to status job for the upper middle class?

rektide 4y ago
The thing is, the practical field is littered with countless different technologies & endless subjective opinions. We'd need 3,000 different tests to test everyone's practical knowledge, to let them pick between. Oh, you use Go and SolidJS, here's a test for you... and who is going to be able to properly give you a score other than works/doesn't work? This person likes functional style but this person is more OO... the base truth is: code is artisinal & subjective 98% of the time. Most code is soft. There's poor metrics to assess & judge it by. Many many many things work. What we do is cultural, is social, is subjective. I'm not sure how to make this come through but I'm rather sympathetic. I think practical experience & can-do coder know-how count for most of the marbles. But I also think it's impressively hard to assess by, that most of what we do is just taste & path dependence on the specific techs we've seen that happened to leave good impressions on us: not science, not knowledge, not truth: most coding, most practice is almost entirely happenstance. But again I want to empathize. Because I think it's cruel to disregard engineers that have seen so much. But I also think you're hyperbolizing overmuch & discrediting the discourse when you make your argument so sharply pointedly. Because there's some truth, absolutely, but it's also no-where near as lopsided. For example, you talk about fresh/current undergrads at Stanford. But this is a pretty regular, basic CS path that any university student should be familiar with. I only had two undergrad classes that really talked to algorithms (Algorithms and then Data structures; OS kind of somewhat), albeit there was some computational thinking already in play at that point. Understanding complexity & algorithms is understanding the basics, it really is. If you can't see time flowing, don't know the tally & impact of the work you're asking for, you're lacking knowledge to avoid a lot of bad decisions. This isn't made up fake shit taught only to the elite. What's alluring about this system is that it has some hard facts & theory underneath it. It's not just opinion & engineering pop-culture. The answers don't change, the rules don't change, the material stays the same, and it's all rooted in being able to analyze and understand problems, rooted in comprehension. Being able to see & understand & analyze, being able to apply some basic principles: this is a pretty sure way to find people who will be able to Not Mess It Up, who are capable of looking, assessing, & navigating through scenarios computationally. And last and perhaps most key to me: it's also material that someone with even a modest bit of aptitude can cram for. Pick up a book like "Cracking the Coding Interview" and you can semi-accurately reproduce the output of four years of undergrad in two or three months of occasional light practice & trying. Projects like Leetcode can get you the experience. You may feel bad that what you want yourself to be measured on doesn't count here, but to people trying to go get hired, it's enormously helpful to them to have well defined expectations, to have specific kinds of tests to expect & be able to prepare & study for. I see so many protests that it's not fair, that it favors only those with the luxury of time, but those views to me massively undermine how wonderfully vastly accessible it is that there's a known, well-described, well-supported subject-area we can study. The industry overflows with things to learn, study, & know, but here's something concrete & specific, which undergirds it all, which alone might not determine your coding skill, but which does indicate you at least have some raw basic intellectual capacity to go understand problems put before you & apply some sensible computational thinking to tackling them. There's tons of things not tested for, but by having a well defined, technology-neutral set of computational thinking tests, based on actual science with objective, factual answers, rather a much wider corpus of future/current/legacy pop-engineering-of-the-day built on nothing but wishy-washy subjective opinion, I think we achieve one of the best possible wins we can against an enemy we both hate: class-based discrimination, cruel tests that reject outgroups.

Cd00d 4y ago

So, they're actually testing to see if you have commitments outside of work. "Great" filtering for parents or people caring for ailing family or any other non-work commitment. I guess it's not ageism at all, right?

hiyer 4y ago

> what's more important is how dedicated you are when it comes to reaching a goal. That may sound good in theory, but in practice I've been rejected quite a few times for not delivering the correct or most optimal solution despite trying my best.

alok-g 4y ago

I'll multiply that reasoning by a few orders of magnitude to show what's wrong with it. Would they hire Olympics winners for these positions?