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> But now that LC has been gamed, How was it gamed? I wasn't aware of anything. Is this about LLMs being able to solve some of the questions?
by weatherlite 4y ago
> But now that LC has been gamed,
How was it gamed? I wasn't aware of anything. Is this about LLMs being able to solve some of the questions?
- resonious 4y agoI think it's only gamed in the Goodhart's Law sense. The original intention of hard CS brain teaser questions was to filter for people who can reason through the questions on the spot. Now because everyone knows the questions and answers, the filter is probably more likely to net you people who put in the memorization hours than high IQ folks.
- californical 4y agoIt’s that it doesn’t really test your depth of knowledge of CS topics, it more just tests that you’re able to memorize categories of problems and how to solve them. Sure you need to understand some basic CS to pass a LC question, but it’s more about recognizing a pattern and having memorized the proper algo for that pattern. If you were taking an algorithms interview 20 years ago, you’d have to truly know a huge breadth of CS knowledge. But now you can just memorize problems for a few months and never learn the true meaning of “why” a tree is the best data structure in x situation. It was “gamed” when people learned that you could pass the interviews without truly understanding the material, if you just memorize the rules of the game and can recite them when asked.
- roncesvalles 4y agoThat doesn't mean it's not testing for the right things. Pattern matching, memory, and understanding are all attributes that help be an effective software engineer. It's also not as easy as you describe - just memorizing patterns. Maybe for the easy-medium questions that ChatGPT can solve, but Google stopped asking such questions a decade ago. The algorithm questions that all the tech companies ask today require real problem-solving.