20 ms·

All of these supposed "flaws" of leetcode are by design. Big companies want people who are smart enough to do the work, but obedient enough to put up with all t

• phailhaus 4y ago
  This is ridiculous. You yourself admitted that conspiracy theory doesn't explain startups. The answer is simple: leetcode interviews are stupid easy to give. There is no "nefarious conspiracy to keep workers obedient." It is simply the path of least effort.
  • abirch 4y ago
    You could use the ancient Microsoft logic questions. They are equivalent as easy. Leetcode is sticky for a reason even if it's not the intended reason.
  • ironman1478 4y ago
    I think leetcode style interviews being easy for the interviewer / company is the most rational explanation for why its so pervasive. Its easy for the company as an automated screener and an on-site because there is a clear pass / fail rubric that can filter people. If you have a bunch of people doing interviews that don't want to do it (Google and FB interviewers cough cough), then this style of interview is perfect for the interviewer to conduct if they just want to get it over with. I've noticed that Apple only uses simple leetcode-y style questions for its phone screens, but for their on-sites they ask very domain specific questions. It is interesting because if you're actually good at the domain you're interviewing for, they are very easy. If you're not they can be intractable. Its clear that each team puts a lot of thought into the interview process and I imagine Apple teams get a very high SNR, at least compared to Google / FB.
• chiefalchemist 4y ago
  I have a saying that sums this up: "How you hire is whom you hire."
• ushakov 4y ago
  startups need even more obedient ones those who will overwork, be on call 24/7, doing 10 men's jobs at once and can tolerate abuse from managers, because you want your stock options to vest
  • onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    Getting paid literally 1/2 of less of what you make at FAANG...
  • onion2k 4y ago
    doing 10 men's jobs at once 10 what now?
    • slig 4y ago
      Ten male humans.
      • samhain 4y ago
        They are trying to point out that women also code instead of going with the colloquial understanding that it would be ten people’s jobs.
      • Koshkin 4y ago
        'Men' does not necessarily mean 'males.'
  • myth_drannon 4y ago
    That's why they hire only 10xers, so they CAN do a work of 10 men!
• eismcc 4y ago
  This reminds me of the interview process at Thinking Machines, where the interview was working onsite for a week and then getting voted on. Or Pixar which required you to excel in atleast one thing in your life
  • ushakov 4y ago
    i excel at training dogs, would Pixar like to hire me?
    • Koshkin 4y ago
      They might (but having that one skill alone may not suffice).
  • jboy55 4y ago
    Re: Thinking machines. If you are looking at moving on from your current company, and are evaluating 6 companies, you have to bank up 6 weeks of PTO to 'try to work' at various companies for a week?
• gitfan86 4y ago
  It seems like a huge inefficiency in the economy that thousands of people are studying and practicing for an entrance exam that has no value in the real work that the companies actually do. But overall that may be a good thing for society. If Google fired all their leet coders and replaced them with real engineers they would not need as many. And the biggest problem may be that there is a limited number of real engineers in the world. Companies have to figure out a way to make so with the people that are available.
  • yonaguska 4y ago
    In your opinion, what's the difference between a leetcoder and a real engineer? In my mind, a real engineer really shines in the non technical aspect of things, like coordination, communication, prioritization, and getting hard questions answered. But that's just me, I'm curious what everyone else's experiences are.
    • willcipriano 4y ago
      To me a real engineer is good at engineering, what you described sounds like a good HR manager.
      • nazka 4y ago
        Same. The biggest point that I didn’t see in comments so far is that Leet Code exercices are really fast to evaluate and it accelerates the pipeline for filtering and hiring. Even a recruiter can “evaluate” them. Just looking at the code more or less and if the automatic tests pass. Which is not the case for exercises for engineers. If you want a real engineering problem it would be mostly about architecture which are long and hard to evaluate. Or about how to break down a rotten program and apply SOLID and other like that to redesign it. Same thing long and hard to evaluate.
      • TurboHaskal 4y ago
        Yeah it sounds like 1x cope.
      • 4y ago
• moduspol 4y ago
  It'd be a fun social experiment if one of the big tech companies replaced the leetcode-style rounds with something arbitrary. Let's say: The "jumping jacks" round. You have to turn your webcam on and do 100 jumping jacks in 60 seconds. Only then will you potentially advance to the next round. The person watching on the other end can evaluate how far over 100 you got, whether or not your form matches best practice, and assess how you were breathing in case... you know... they hire you and then there's a business need for you to do 500 jumping jacks in five minutes. They might not even end up hiring anyone different than they otherwise would.
  • 1ark 4y ago
    Pretty awesome pace if you can do a 100 in a minute. https://youtu.be/u81LxIlLGnc https://youtu.be/u81LxIlLGnc
    • moduspol 4y ago
      Looks like a solid $300k/yr+ software engineer to me. Can you send me his LinkedIn?
      • LanceH 4y ago
        You should see the 10x engineer's jumping jacks.
  • gumby 4y ago
    I know it’s a jokey example but it has insight. First, it’s probably illegal in the USA due to ADA unless you could show that it tested something physically related to the job. Example: a big company is required to make accommodation for a, say, qualified analyst who is blind, but can reject a blind candidate for a job that required driving. But after 45+ years of hiring programmers, the world hasn’t yet figured out which factors are germaine and which are not.
  • pyb 4y ago
    Have you heard of Amazon's "LP" interviews? It seems to be a little bit like that. The challenge there is to tell a number of well-rehearsed stories.
• brandall10 4y ago
  Every unicorny startup I've interviewed w/ that had a standard big-tech interview loop (1 LC style screener + final w/ 2-3 rounds of LC + 1 system design) was chock full of ex-big tech engineers and managers, replete with stories about wanting a faster paced / dynamic environment. So yes, that absolutely is who they are recruiting. It probably comes down to no more than believing big tech companies have the very best in the industry (ie. like being in an Ivy League school) and standardizing the hiring bar w/ other companies they're actively in competition with. More than obedience, it probably is the aspect that they're smart and determined to succeed.
  • s17n 4y ago
    > More than obedience, it probably is the aspect that they're smart and determined to succeed. Yup that's what it's about! The problem with trying to test how good you are at the job is that you simply can't do it in a 1 hour (or even a 1 day) interview. You can however assess how smart somebody is, which is definitely correlated to job performance. It's also connected to growth potential - even if it were somehow possible to accurately measure how good a programmer a candidate is at the moment they are applying for the job, companies would still want to try to predict how good they are likely to be over the next few years.
    • biztos 4y ago
      > You can however assess how smart somebody is Are you saying the Leetcode-style interview assesses how smart someone is?
      • adsfoiu1 4y ago
        Not OP, and I don't think it directly indicates how smart you are, but it does show you are at or above some smartness threshold (i.e. smart enough to get the answer). If you don't get the answer, you might still be above that smartness threshold, but didn't get it for some other reason (didn't have time to study, didn't sleep enough the night before, interview anxiety, etc.).
• lkxijlewlf 4y ago
  I think there is this: > Big companies want people who are smart enough to do the work, but obedient enough to put up with all the bullshit that comes with working at a big company. But then you also have the companies who see other companies do it, so they cargo cult. Those are companies you definitely want to avoid. Their entire stack is because of cargo culting not because of an engineering need. I think you also have a few of the Bro Culture companies who do this as a hazing ritual.
• lkrubner 4y ago
  The idea that companies are using leetcode tests for rational reasons goes against everything I've seen and experienced or read about. What I have seen, working at startups for more than 20 years, is irrational, self-destructive behavior, over and over and over again. I've worked with many entrepreneurs who have a few million dollars in the bank, and they have a great idea, but they self-destruct due to two big reasons: ego and fear. I wrote about this in How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps, where I talk about two cases that I saw with my own eyes. This kind of self-destruction is much more common than the kind of clever, rational behavior that you impute to these companies. And I think many other people are also witnessing this kind of irrational, self-destructive behavior, consider the reviews posted on the books page, where quite a few people chimed in to say the book matched their own experience: https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-ebook/dp/B0772FJQ1T/ https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-eboo...
  • ramesh31 4y ago
    Would love to talk about the dating app world. It's so funny how many founders come into it thinking their "revolutionary matching algorithm" or whatever is going to make the greatest dating app ever. Until you realize that the problem is human nature, and no one wants to be told who they should match with. People want a name, an age, and a face; that's it. And anything that gets in the way of that will lead to your app being ignored.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • uncletaco 4y ago
      And a height.
      • brianhorakh 4y ago
        And a wallet (sometimes)
        • 4y ago
• dominotw 4y ago
  Funny that we've been discussing a version of this every single week in last decade but leetcode has gotten more prevalent, not less.
  • pyb 4y ago
    The Leetcode system is incredibly self-perpetuating for some reason.
• LaGrange 4y ago
  The Purpose of a System Is What It Does. And just because in case of companies that purpose is often unspoken, doesn't mean it doesn't apply. And that's why leetcode and inane interview processes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
• yalogin 4y ago
  > obedient enough to put up with bull shit I have see an over reliance on leetcode style question in startups actually. May be more fairly, "we want to be google" style companies which is every startup. In fact some large companies have a more relaxed way of interviewing.
• corrral 4y ago
  A key clue about some of their reasons for doing it is that they still make you go through it even if you're, say, applying at Google, passed theirs 8 years ago, passed Facebook's 5 years ago, and passed Netflix's 2 years ago. I think part of the purpose is to cool competition between them.
• pydry 4y ago
  I think it's more along the lines of "well, this is how I got in and if it recognized my genius it must be pretty good". Along with "if we all had to go through this shit, so should you". IME its biggest defenders are people who were a little bit extra proud to have gotten a job at Google and I reckon its as much those types as much as upper management keeping it going. Like frat hazing rituals the fact it intrinsically makes no sense is sort of beside the point. Like frat hazing rituals it'll have to be rooted out like a weed to actually go away coz it's well and truly baked in.
• spamizbad 4y ago
  Some of startups are founded by people with limited technical experience who, as a crutch, just cargo-cult technology trends from bigco's. IME you're better off going full "cowboy" than trying to crib bigco practices.
• q-big 4y ago
  > Big companies want people who are smart enough to do the work, but obedient enough to put up with all the bullshit that comes with working at a big company. What person better matches that than someone who's able and willing to study for and pass a tech version of the SAT? Leetcode rather measures whether you are into brutal cramming. Let's put it this way: the kind of people that fits this property is in my opinion often "a little bit special", i.e. not the kind of employee that in my experience both startups and big companies prefer.
• yolo69420 4y ago
  this post is way too optimistic. you're implying the people making the decision that leetcode tests are used are competent enough to know they suck but still use them for the soft-factors you mention. I would bet essentially all of my money that instead they're simply incompetent and actually think these tests are good at testing ability. that being said, everybody talks about like leetcode tests for a week straight is the norm. I've recently been through the whole thing with several big tech companies and some smaller companies, and all of them only used them for the phone screen. in fact with microsoft for various reasons they skipped my phone screen and I went straight to onsite, and there was no leetcoding involved at all. still some whiteboard coding, but rather about highly specialized problems relevant to my field, none of this algorithm puzzle bullshit.
  • dangus 4y ago
    I can boil this incompetence you describe down even further: employers and their employees don’t want to spend time making their own interview challenges. It’s actually pretty hard and time consuming to come up with a mock scenario and evaluate it, especially when you also have your regular work to do. Leetcode is seen as good enough and all the effort is on the interviewee. The current employees don’t see the pain and suckage. They already have a job and it’s not their problem.
    • weatherlite 4y ago
      > It’s actually pretty hard and time consuming to come up with a mock scenario and evaluate it That's a hard problem for some startup, not for FAANGs. They could do hundreds of those and keep switching them quite easily.
      • dangus 4y ago
        Some FAANGS do this. Amazon has/had their own code evaluation system along with a live proctored exercise. I think most companies are looking for the path of least resistance.
    • 8ytecoder 4y ago
• xydinesh 4y ago
  I haven't thought about the bigco tech interview process like this. But now you put it out, it makes perfect sense :) I tried white board interviews about 10-12 years ago with big companies and failed miserably. Then I decided never to take a white board coding interview again which I haven't done yet. However, after working for startups and a few acquisitions later I ended up in a silicon valley big company without doing a white board coding interview. I'm not sure where I went with the story, may be to show that there are alternatives if you don't want to do white board coding.
• donretag 4y ago
  "companies want people who are smart enough to do the work, but obedient enough to put up with all the bullshit" Which is why I love leetcode interviews: I get an insight at how a company, especially tech management, operates. During the dog-n-pony show interview, I will put up with it, but will definitely cast the company in a poor light. I tell companies that I am interviewing with that I will not prepare with leetcode (some will suggest it). I rather spend my time reading higher-level concepts. You know, the stuff that actually helps in modern software development. I left out the word "big" in my quote. Companies of all sizes do leetcode interviews and want heads down and STFU type of developers.
• foobiekr 4y ago
  The problem with this theory is that I have met a ton of engineers who really have a lot of their identity wrapped up in how well they did on leetcode interviews [mostly by memorizing enough of them to pattern match] and heap scorn on candidates who don't do well on them as if they are subhumans. The ego and status jockeying appeal of leetcode is very, very high and a lot of engineers just eat it up. I think discussions of this topic which ignore the fact that there is a substantial population in our industry who fall into this trap are basically flawed.
  • aulin 4y ago
    and those will be the same people perpetrating this flawed interview system, because interviewers tend to look for themselves in the interviewee
• masterof0 4y ago
  I agree, on the startup side, the only "brilliant" player is the founder(s), and they just need people to pump code, do marketing, etc... non-stop, because "they believe on the mission". I don't like the Leetcode interviews either, but what can we do? I have had the other types of interviews (take home projects, trivia questions, code reviews, pair programming) and all of them suck as well. At least with leetcode you know if you "got it right", there is less subjectivity in the process. Also, assuming someone is less smart because do leetcode interviews is a bad take. All companies (not only startups) need obedient workers, and the interview method have very little to do with that. If you are a true rebel, would you work for somebody else?
• ilc 4y ago
  I'd agree with this. If they want people to crank out the product they have in mind... Test for hte ability to crank code. And in that case the leetcode interview may actually be very valid, and not even evil!
• na85 4y ago
  >startups are supposed to be, uh, innovating, developing new technology, and working on hard, meaningful problems? Maybe 1% of startups do this. The rest are shitting out the software equivalent of Juicero.
• superfrank 4y ago
  I don't know man. I think you're going against Hanlon's razor with this belief. LeetCode type problems may do the things you're saying, but I'm not sure that's the intent. Personally, I believe the reason companies do LeetCode type questions is because everyone else is doing them and no one can agree on a better way. Large companies want a hiring process that scales and is relatively uniform and LeetCode questions meet that criteria. Is there a better way? Probably, but figuring out what that is takes time, effort, and investment and most companies don't want make that investment for something they may get wrong. Basically, most everyone knows LeetCode is shit, but as long as everyone else is doing it, there's little incentive to change. If everyone is doing the same stupid thing, at least your company isn't falling behind. If you decide to do something different, there's a real possibility you could spend a bunch of time and effort only to make things worse.
• barbazoo 4y ago
  > You might ask, so why do startups do leetcode too? Not all big companies do, not all startups do and not all companies of sizes in between do. It's also a little bit up to the candidates to just not put up with the bs and stop the interview process or not even start it in the first place.
• nafix 4y ago
  I think comparing it to the Bar exam for Law (and other field's equivalents) is a more apt comparison than the SAT.
• rmbyrro 4y ago
  Exactly. It's all about signaling [1]: "... However, employers do refer to the educational background to differentiate between high-quality workers and low-quality workers (Kasika, 2015). Consequently, individuals with higher-ability use their educational background to gain the "education signals" that allow them to move into high level and high wage positions" In this case, the "educational background" is shown by solving leetcode-style algos. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299509496_Signaling_Value_of_Education https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299509496_Signaling...
• jsiaajdsdaa 4y ago
  >an exercise left to the reader So it turns out that startups also want a culture of meaningless and arbitrary brainteasers instead of building cool shit that works?
• Waterluvian 4y ago
  I don’t think companies are doing it consciously, but I do think that they do use eighty hours of interviews and coding challenges to select for compliant fungible cogs.
• serial_dev 4y ago
  > why do startups do leetcode too? A point that I didn't see yet made. The truth is that lots (though of course not all) startup companies just have no idea what they are doing. I had to deal with the complexities that imagined possible future scalability issues introduced into our stack when the whole customer base could be served by a raspberry pi, and it happened in multiple companies. And it is not just infrastructure, but also code. I have to follow the twisted clean architecture rules and write tons of boilerplate code (that could make sense on the backend for a complex system) for a mobile app that is basically just a skin over a graphql API (basically no business logic on the client). The same happens when hiring: we need top talent like FAANG companies do (but we can't pay for it), because we are awesome, where in reality anyone with a sceptical, product-focused mindset and a "get things done" attitude would do. In my opinion this happens because we don't want to admit that our startups will likely not need the scalability for years, we won't need to follow fancy architecture patterns because our app is simple, and we could do well with developers who don't have top computer science skills.
• 908B64B197 4y ago
  > What person better matches that than someone who's able and willing to study for and pass a tech version of the SAT? Is it actually? "Leetcode" is pretty much covered by 6.006 [0] or equivalent. You shouldn't have to "grind" or study for hours if you passed the class (your problem sets should more than cover what you'll do on the blackboard). Anyone applying for a serious engineering job should have at least done one algorithm class. This is what leetcode filters for. [0] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-006-introduction-to-algorithms-fall-2011/pages/syllabus/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-006-introduction-to-algorithms...
• Jistern 4y ago
• jjav 4y ago
  > No, we all know it measures those things, and those are exactly the things the measurers want to measure. I wouldn't be so sure everyone realizes it doesn't measure anything relevant to actual job performance although it should be obvious (since nobody whiteboards algorithm puzzles all day in an actual job). In all of these threads there will be many people saying they only want to hire the top% of developers (as if it was a strict linear scale, as opposed to hundreds of intertwined skills) and they justify leetcoding as the way to do that in a belief that top leetcoder is somehow a top software engineer, instead of realizing these are unrelated skillsets.
• bko 4y ago
  I think you're overthinking it. I think very simple questions are appropriate just because you want to see if the person knows how to code. Not knows how to balance a binary tree, but literally knows how to code. You'd be surprised how many programmers I've interviewed that literally couldn't get anything to compile. To be fair, you see the same in the finance world where someone lists Excel and data analysis as skill sets and then doesn't know how to do a vlookup. People write all sorts of stuff on their resume. They took a C course in college 10 years ago and write C as a skill. They could be programming managers and not know what a pull request is. I think its definitely gone too far, but basic coding proficiency is essential IMO.
• novok 4y ago
  I don't think a lot of thought is put into it. It's inertia and 'what the the other successful big companies do'. There is also a subset that enjoys leetcode interviews and complain if you don't do it. Everyone does it because big daddy successful google started it, and thus it self perpetuates. 20 years ago it was bullshit microsoft-style lateral thinking questions that were that generation's leetcode. On top of that, the only people who can really get rid of leetcode are pretty much sr staff or principle engineers and high level HR people. It also doesn't get you promoted or paid more in most companies to go on a long project to change the interview process. Thus it doesn't get changed. I estimate that leetcode will probably go away in many big companies in 5-15 years from now as today's sr engineers become the next sr management and founders that actually makes these decisions. Many startups today explicitly do not have leetcode interview loops, while 10 years ago many did have leetcode interview loops. When that generation of startups have their facebook that defines their decade and thus defines the next common interview fad, leetcode will start going away. It also allows you have any engineer interview pretty much any other engineer, which makes interviews overall easier to do.