6 ms·

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 th

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.
  - mattkrause 4y ago
    I don't think HR is usually on that level. For example, suppose your team generates and shares some kind of data. You want to change the wire format. You could just go ahead and do it, letting the chips fall where they may, but I think that's bad engineering/engineering management. It'd be better to coordinate with the folks consuming the data. Can you make their migration easier? While you're making a breaking change, are there others that would make sense to roll in? Are there times when it'd be better/worse to roll out the new version? Being proactive about this sort of stuff seems like good engineering to me.
    - willcipriano 4y ago
      All of those things are people management, and I agree people management is an important skill to have if you want to work in a big company in particular it isn't related to engineering. A guy who is completely non-verbal but makes a solar panel that is 5% more efficient is a great engineer, perhaps not liked by those around him but still a great engineer. Terry Davis was a great engineer and he had the worst commutation skills you could imagine.
  - watwut 4y ago
    HR does not do that. They don't prioritize nor coordinate - unless you count getting people to company dinner as coordination. They do communicate, but rarely about product or how things are done or should be done. And I don't mean that as criticism, I mean ythat as "it is not their job"
- Koshkin 4y ago
  I don't know about that, the best engineers I have met were introverts. (They preferred reading to "communicating.")
  - yonaguska 4y ago
    I mean, I'm an introvert and I prefer working with code, not people, but I've found my own productivity has skyrocketed now that I'm making an effort to reach out more and raise questions about bigger issues than just the immediate technical issue I'm facing. I've worked with many people much smarter than me. And I've watched smart, very technical engineers silo themselves off. And then I've watch smart technical engineers that make an effort to communicate and lead initiatives to improve the codebase, make arguments to management for tackling tech debt, and speak up during technical grooming to propose better solutions. And while the siloed off introvert might be able to write better code faster, the engineer that is looking at the whole picture makes an entire team move faster.
- shepardrtc 4y ago
  I agree with all of those things. A real engineer has soft skills and the ability to look beyond the immediate problem to see what is at the heart of the issue. They can see the effects of a solution and see the problems that might arise from it. They see connections. Leetcoders just find the most efficient solution for the problem at hand. They don't see connections to other problems, whether current or potential. They're a scalpel when you really need a massage. I've seen leetcoders throw away less-efficient, safer solutions just to implement something more efficient and clever. And when things fail, they're nowhere to be found. Too busy with whatever current Story they're on.
  - vsareto 4y ago
    You don't want to be a real engineer in business though. Real engineers do all of the hard work and thinking while getting paid less than management.
    - shepardrtc 4y ago
      I've done management. It's mind-numbing and soul-sucking. I'll take the pay cut to have the stimulation and challenge of being an engineer.
- tekla 4y ago
  All of that non-technical stuff wont help you when the bridge you signed off on collapses because you had no idea what the blueprint was actually saying. I think a bunch of this "engineers don't actually need to know stuff" comes from a generation that never had to deal with things that might kill people if it fails.
  - mattkrause 4y ago
    A lone idiot can certainly foul things up, but look at how catastrophes usually unfold. The right information is usually somewhere in the organization, but it isn’t shared or acted upon appropriately. The Challenger report is pretty clear that it was “an accident rooted in history”. They had a decade of data about O-ring performance in the cold, but it was ignored/overruled in the decision to launch. It certainly wasn’t the case that The New Guy just grabbed some rubber from the wrong shelf and blew up a space shuttle. The Mars Climate Orbiter was lost because of a metric vs imperial mixup, but it wasn’t one dev who capriciously decided to work in inches; there were whole teams that weren’t synced up. Engineers certainly need to know something, but I’d bet the farm that a team of B+ engineers with good coordination can run circles around “rockstars” that won’t work together. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if a lone idiot can wreak havoc, it's usually a coordination problem further up.
- rusticpenn 4y ago
  One has time and patience to practice for leet code interviews, while the other is too busy for it.
- thraway11 4y ago
  Are those properties exclusive? Someone has to write std::sort The problem is not LC. The problem is companies not tailoring the interview to the position.
bpicolo 4y ago
> replaced them with real engineers nice gatekeeping. Shame on them for working to get a job they want.
- blueflow 4y ago
  After seeing all the unreliable and buggy software, i think more gatekeeping in IT would probably be beneficial. You wouldn't let someone do surgery on you that hasn't been to medical school.
  - jmartin2683 4y ago
    Good engineers learned their craft long before any school got ahold of them. The really good ones skipped the handholding.
    - frostwarrior 4y ago
      Good engineers are professional engineers. A good engineer does a good job on what's expected on them. A good engineer does not have to be a leet hacker, in the same way a good architect does not have to be a geeky concrete fanboy.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      This is where you get attitudes like: "If you haven't been programming since you were six, you're rubbish and we don't want you."
      - iostream24 4y ago
        I will take a programmer from age 6 over a dozen alleged “software engineers” performing “best practices” theater. The former can deliver good software with less bugs, the latter might be able to, but are more likely to bikeshed endlessly, while being hamstrung by “best” practices that turn out to be inapplicable in a given domain, or even damaging. Do wake me up when software engineering becomes a standardized practice that isn’t a mere cargo cult. I swear, if I read one more comment about doctors and surgery and licensing I’m going to have to diverge on a rant exposing the multiple flaws in popular SE best practices.
thisiswrongggg 4y ago
How many companies have written and still do write their very own IAM solution? Duplicating work and inefficiencies is at the core of modern IT production.

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.
- mattkrause 4y ago
  I don't think HR is usually on that level. For example, suppose your team generates and shares some kind of data. You want to change the wire format. You could just go ahead and do it, letting the chips fall where they may, but I think that's bad engineering/engineering management. It'd be better to coordinate with the folks consuming the data. Can you make their migration easier? While you're making a breaking change, are there others that would make sense to roll in? Are there times when it'd be better/worse to roll out the new version? Being proactive about this sort of stuff seems like good engineering to me.
  - willcipriano 4y ago
    All of those things are people management, and I agree people management is an important skill to have if you want to work in a big company in particular it isn't related to engineering. A guy who is completely non-verbal but makes a solar panel that is 5% more efficient is a great engineer, perhaps not liked by those around him but still a great engineer. Terry Davis was a great engineer and he had the worst commutation skills you could imagine.
- watwut 4y ago
  HR does not do that. They don't prioritize nor coordinate - unless you count getting people to company dinner as coordination. They do communicate, but rarely about product or how things are done or should be done. And I don't mean that as criticism, I mean ythat as "it is not their job"
Koshkin 4y ago
I don't know about that, the best engineers I have met were introverts. (They preferred reading to "communicating.")
- yonaguska 4y ago
  I mean, I'm an introvert and I prefer working with code, not people, but I've found my own productivity has skyrocketed now that I'm making an effort to reach out more and raise questions about bigger issues than just the immediate technical issue I'm facing. I've worked with many people much smarter than me. And I've watched smart, very technical engineers silo themselves off. And then I've watch smart technical engineers that make an effort to communicate and lead initiatives to improve the codebase, make arguments to management for tackling tech debt, and speak up during technical grooming to propose better solutions. And while the siloed off introvert might be able to write better code faster, the engineer that is looking at the whole picture makes an entire team move faster.
shepardrtc 4y ago
I agree with all of those things. A real engineer has soft skills and the ability to look beyond the immediate problem to see what is at the heart of the issue. They can see the effects of a solution and see the problems that might arise from it. They see connections. Leetcoders just find the most efficient solution for the problem at hand. They don't see connections to other problems, whether current or potential. They're a scalpel when you really need a massage. I've seen leetcoders throw away less-efficient, safer solutions just to implement something more efficient and clever. And when things fail, they're nowhere to be found. Too busy with whatever current Story they're on.
- vsareto 4y ago
  You don't want to be a real engineer in business though. Real engineers do all of the hard work and thinking while getting paid less than management.
  - shepardrtc 4y ago
    I've done management. It's mind-numbing and soul-sucking. I'll take the pay cut to have the stimulation and challenge of being an engineer.
tekla 4y ago
All of that non-technical stuff wont help you when the bridge you signed off on collapses because you had no idea what the blueprint was actually saying. I think a bunch of this "engineers don't actually need to know stuff" comes from a generation that never had to deal with things that might kill people if it fails.
- mattkrause 4y ago
  A lone idiot can certainly foul things up, but look at how catastrophes usually unfold. The right information is usually somewhere in the organization, but it isn’t shared or acted upon appropriately. The Challenger report is pretty clear that it was “an accident rooted in history”. They had a decade of data about O-ring performance in the cold, but it was ignored/overruled in the decision to launch. It certainly wasn’t the case that The New Guy just grabbed some rubber from the wrong shelf and blew up a space shuttle. The Mars Climate Orbiter was lost because of a metric vs imperial mixup, but it wasn’t one dev who capriciously decided to work in inches; there were whole teams that weren’t synced up. Engineers certainly need to know something, but I’d bet the farm that a team of B+ engineers with good coordination can run circles around “rockstars” that won’t work together. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if a lone idiot can wreak havoc, it's usually a coordination problem further up.
rusticpenn 4y ago
One has time and patience to practice for leet code interviews, while the other is too busy for it.
thraway11 4y ago
Are those properties exclusive? Someone has to write std::sort The problem is not LC. The problem is companies not tailoring the interview to the position.

bpicolo 4y ago

> replaced them with real engineers nice gatekeeping. Shame on them for working to get a job they want.

blueflow 4y ago
After seeing all the unreliable and buggy software, i think more gatekeeping in IT would probably be beneficial. You wouldn't let someone do surgery on you that hasn't been to medical school.
- jmartin2683 4y ago
  Good engineers learned their craft long before any school got ahold of them. The really good ones skipped the handholding.
  - frostwarrior 4y ago
    Good engineers are professional engineers. A good engineer does a good job on what's expected on them. A good engineer does not have to be a leet hacker, in the same way a good architect does not have to be a geeky concrete fanboy.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    This is where you get attitudes like: "If you haven't been programming since you were six, you're rubbish and we don't want you."
    - iostream24 4y ago
      I will take a programmer from age 6 over a dozen alleged “software engineers” performing “best practices” theater. The former can deliver good software with less bugs, the latter might be able to, but are more likely to bikeshed endlessly, while being hamstrung by “best” practices that turn out to be inapplicable in a given domain, or even damaging. Do wake me up when software engineering becomes a standardized practice that isn’t a mere cargo cult. I swear, if I read one more comment about doctors and surgery and licensing I’m going to have to diverge on a rant exposing the multiple flaws in popular SE best practices.

thisiswrongggg 4y ago

How many companies have written and still do write their very own IAM solution? Duplicating work and inefficiencies is at the core of modern IT production.