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To be honest if I was an employer I probably would do leet code or similar. The logic would be that yes, many engineers are shy or nervous around people. But lo

by natly 4y ago

To be honest if I was an employer I probably would do leet code or similar. The logic would be that yes, many engineers are shy or nervous around people. But losing those is worth it since hiring someone bad that you have to fire (that wastes some months of productive time at the company) and then re-hire someone else is definitely worth that risk. Having made something impressive on github is somewhat fakeable since you can get a lot of help from the internet or even copy large chunks (that you may understand but didn't have to invent) from stack overflow. Someone who can do leet code at least have some hard-to-fake ability to reason and work under pressure. That said, I still don't like doing leet code interviews and I'm pretty bad at them, but that's the logic that imagine goes on in an employers mind (hence why "they're missing out on some types of candidates" logic likely won't sway anyone reading these comments I suspect).

shrimpx 4y ago
> get a lot of help from the internet But this exactly what they’ll do on the job. Actually, searching for help and distilling what you’ve found into a clean solution is a skill in itself.
- natly 4y ago
  Yeah but it's somewhat hard to determine how difficult a challenge it actually was to produce that piece of code from the outside. It may be a signal of competence, or it may be one of those things that seems really impressive but they actually just followed a youtube tutorial that explained most of it step by step. (Which is a fine solution if you found that for a particular problem you had to solve, but it's not a reliable signal they'll be able to solve arbitrary things in the future - not everything has been explained by someone else, especially when trying to tackle very novel problems.) The point is that code challenges are a pretty hard to fake test and the loss of some types of people is worth it for the employer (like me, who sucks at them).

by natly 4y ago

shrimpx 4y ago

> get a lot of help from the internet But this exactly what they’ll do on the job. Actually, searching for help and distilling what you’ve found into a clean solution is a skill in itself.

natly 4y ago
Yeah but it's somewhat hard to determine how difficult a challenge it actually was to produce that piece of code from the outside. It may be a signal of competence, or it may be one of those things that seems really impressive but they actually just followed a youtube tutorial that explained most of it step by step. (Which is a fine solution if you found that for a particular problem you had to solve, but it's not a reliable signal they'll be able to solve arbitrary things in the future - not everything has been explained by someone else, especially when trying to tackle very novel problems.) The point is that code challenges are a pretty hard to fake test and the loss of some types of people is worth it for the employer (like me, who sucks at them).