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Lyft was paying engineers 300-450k a year, sometimes with just 2-4 years of experience. This was true even pre 2020. The interviews were just leetcode hards, wi

Lyft was paying engineers 300-450k a year, sometimes with just 2-4 years of experience. This was true even pre 2020. The interviews were just leetcode hards, with an instant reject on not getting the problem right. I feel like a parrot repeating the same thing, but none of these companies hired the talent they thought they were hiring. EDIT: For reference I work at a company that requires leetcode medium/hard perfection and am appalled at the money we pay for the engineers relative to the value they bring One more point: Startups are confused about the role engineers play. A completely divorced product management and engineering workforce will kill new ideas. Engineers actually building the product have insights into what else can be built that product does not. By hiring engineers with zero product sense and treating them like robots, you get no innovation. This doesnt matter at a behemoth like amazon or google, but it does at a smaller company. Clean syntax != good engineer

makestuff 3y ago
I hope this downturn gets rid of leetcode. I really have no desire to grind leetcode whenever I need a new job. I am more than happy to do system design and practical coding questions (ex: integrate with some API like Stripe does), but the leetcode stuff is ridiculous for mid-senior+ level engineers.
- jmole 3y ago
  I don't think it will be the downturn that eliminates it, so much as it will be LLM-accelerated coding, and the normalization and incorporation of these tools into standard development workflows. If you think co-pilot is cool now, just wait and see what it does in 5 years. A team of 10 tomorrow can probably replace a team of 50 today. So maybe the interview process in 10 years is more like: "build an auction site like ebay in the next hour."
  - arthurcolle 3y ago
    > So maybe the interview process in 10 years is more like: "build an auction site like ebay in the next hour." This is very "Monkey's Paw" and I can absolutely see something like that taking hold, as sloppy and stupid as such a task might be. I had an interview with a YC company who asked me how to do something, and then I did it, and then they asked "how could I make it a one-liner" - immediately thought was "I'm pretty sure I don't want to maintain a codebase full of fun little one-liners for everything" - managed to get it, but it definitely looked like crap. If I were to get asked to build eBay in an hour, I'm sure my auction model would be 1) shit, 2) very prone to social engineering type attacks (fake bids, etc)
  - fnimick 3y ago
    Who needs LLM-accelerated coding for that? Leetcode was already comically unrealistic as an evaluation of actual engineering skill. When's the last time you had to solve an algorithm puzzle without any ability to do research or check references? Shoutout to the interview I had where I was asked a tricky graph question, reasoned my way to the optimal solution, then failed because I "should have recognized" that it was a variant of Djikstra's algorithm from the beginning. As we all know, being able to regurgitate an existing algorithm shows far more promise than being able to logically create it yourself!
    - bckr 3y ago
      I think that this shows how these interviews are really just a way to not get sued for discrimination when an interviewer just doesn’t like you.
  - breck 3y ago
    > If you think co-pilot is cool now, just wait and see what it does in 5 years. What will it do? It can't write exponentially better code. Maybe 50% better, so that I would need to edit it's outputs less often. The only thing I could see it doing exponentially better would be writing _less_ code. Telling me "stop! close this file. close this project. you are working on the wrong thing!" Technology can jump sharply but then go relatively flat. We still haven't gone back to the moon, 50 years later. We still don't have at-home nuclear power plants.
- rcme 3y ago
  I detest leetcode-style questions, but system design questions are even worse. At least leetcode-style questions have some type of objective evaluation criteria. System design questions are entirely subjective and whether or not you're successful generally comes down to whether or not your first impression of a problem matches the expectations of your interviewer. At my last company, we stopped doing system design entirely because we found it was completely uncorrelated to whether or not a candidate did well on the job.
  - jkaptur 3y ago
    Did you hire people who did poorly on the system design interview and then measure their job performance? Or did you just determine that "passing with flying colors" didn't really improve job performance vs. "just scraping by"?
    - rcme 3y ago
      We moved from leetcode + system design question to project-based interview + system design question to just project based. Our project-based interviews were the main hiring criteria, and we originally planned on using system design interviews for leveling. What we found is that doing well on the project-based interview was a much better signal than the system design interview. When we used the system design interview for leveling, we under leveled certain people and over leveled others. We discovered that it would have been more accurate to only use the project interview for both making a hiring decision and leveling. Ultimately, what we had trouble with was formalizing the evaluation criteria for the system design interview. With a project interview, we formalized the requirements of the project and everyone on the loop evaluates candidates against those criteria. With the system design interview, only one person ends up evaluating each candidate and a single person's judgement is highly variable. Unless the candidate did something egregiously wrong, it was very hard to say whether or not something was strictly "bad" or "good" and it was impossible to write down the list of "bad" and "good" qualities ahead of time.
      - MichaelNolan 3y ago
        How did you structure your project based interview? Was it live pair coding, or a take home project? Did you have any trouble with candidates declining the project? My first instinct as a candidate is to turn down take home project based interviews. I almost always say no to them (especially if it’s for the 1st round) for a few reasons: One: In general they seem like a poor use of my time. I would rather do 5 one hour coding or design interviews at 5 different companies than a single 5 hour project at one company. Two: I’m skeptical that anyone is actually reviewing the submitted project. And the evaluation criteria are usually unclear. For instance is it worth it to add linters during the build process? Or to introduce caching for api responses? Will the person evaluating the project notice details like that? Lastly: Every coding or design interview carries over to the next one. Preparing for one is preparing for all of them. In contrast I’ve seen projects (for a backend role) range from “build a simple weather api, any language” to “build a sudoku solver specifically in JavaScript”.
- qbasic_forever 3y ago
  Unfortunately it will likely get worse in the short term. With a huge pool of laid off people fighting for a small number of open positions (especially at the senior level and above) companies can be as demanding and stupid as they want with hiring. Leet code prowess is just another screening that whittles down the work they have to do to hire--only people that study and learn those interviews will pass them so the company has to worry less about actually figuring out if someone is a good fit for the position.
- diehunde 3y ago
  The problem is that you and the other hundreds of senior engineers would perform the same if it were all design and the other example you gave. There's just not a good solution for companies that must evaluate the number of candidates these big companies get daily.
  - rendaw 3y ago
    You can already filter out 95% of candidates with fizz buzz.
- time_to_smile 3y ago
  Leetcode is also just an awful signal. It would be fine if it was only problems with false negatives, but the false positive rate is through the roof. I'm consistently shocked by coworkers I've had, who I knew had to pass challenging leetcode interviews, who seem to not only know nothing about building real world software, but don't really have a firm grasp on algorithms. Yes they can process a leetcode question requiring dynamic programming in record time, but when mapping a real world problem to a dp (or any other similar solution) are completely at a loss.
- lumost 3y ago
  It’s a balance, an LC medium isn’t to hard to do offhand. If your business is hard tech, it’s a reasonable filter. I see diminishing returns from LC hards and greater other than as a guardrail to block management from hiring senior people who are practically no better than the junior people.
- lovecg 3y ago
  If you think of Leetcode and similar filters as just veiled IQ tests it makes way more sense - of course those problems don’t have much to do with actual day to day engineering. If companies could just administer IQ tests they would happily do that. Since that’s illegal, they rely on Leetcode.
  - greatpostman 3y ago
    Not all iq is created equal. Creativity matters
    - anthonypasq 3y ago
      testing for creativity is much harder than testing for iq, and a high iq person with no creativity is a safer bet than a dumb creative person.
  - blululu 3y ago
    It's a modified IQ test filtered through the transfer function of having a CS degree. A big part of the shade that this practice gets is from people with backgrounds that are CS adjacent who are highly intelligent, can do math at a university level and perfectly capable of writing quality production ready code are dinged because they don't know some CS 201 puzzle that is never used in practice.
    - 93po 3y ago
      Interviewing isn't just a measure of how good you are at programming in real life. It's how good of an employee you will be. Conformity is a strong indicator of this. Comparing someone who completed a CS degree versus some guy that learned to program in a garage hacking together broken computer parts - the employer is going to choose the CS degree guy, even if the hacker is better at programming. CS degree means you follow direction, you can work within a rigid structure, you follow rules enough to make good grades and not get kicked out, and you're capable of doing monotonous work that sometimes has very little value.
      - 3y ago
- myth_drannon 3y ago
  From reading recent interview experiences on Reddit, the thing got way worse now that you have thousands of unemployed engineers competing for scarce positions. Now it's leetcode hards AND takeaway assignment.
- cwilkes 3y ago
  How would the downturn get rid of leetcode? If anything it will dramatically increase its use as now there’s 100k more programmers on the market all applying for the same reduced pool of jobs. Somehow companies are going to have to now filter through a lot more candidates to fill positions, and for right now leetcode-like tests are the quickest way to get a gauge of an engineer’s performance (on leetcode). Don’t get me wrong: I think leetcode hiring depending on how it is done doesn’t result in getting the best talent.
matrix_overload 3y ago
They didn't care. They needed to show investors a plausibly looking story how they "hire the best" by having a process with >90% rejection rate, and they did.
tempsy 3y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by "even pre 2020". High comp did not just start with covid. This had been the case for many years before the pandemic.
- herval 3y ago
  there was a crazy spike in hiring and salaries during the pandemic, with many companies hiring whoever they could find, as fast as possible (hence with higher salaries). I'm assuming that's what OP is referring to
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wpietri 3y ago
And one of the puzzling things to me here is what all those engineers are doing. I mean, if you're making bad hiring decisions, engineers can happily create work for one another and themselves, so I get where the labor could be going. But it does not look to me like Lyft and Uber are particularly feature-filled. I suspect that if rideshare companies ever get to being profitable, we'll see the emergence of white-label rideshare software that gets made for a tiny fraction of the cost of what Lyft and Uber spend. Because that'll be an organization with a real incentive to keep costs down.
- iLoveOncall 3y ago
  As always with large companies, what you see as a consumer is only the tip of the iceberg. For every user-facing line of code you have a hundred or a thousand lines of code made internal-only services, for interacting with partners, for variations due to local restrictions, etc.
  - wpietri 3y ago
    Sure. I mean I have some questions about your proportions, but let that pass. We clearly agree that the amount of total code is proportional to the user-facing stuff. Which for Lyft seems to be quite stable. And since the main function of developers is to improve things, that makes me wonder. I also suspect that with larger companies, a lot of that below-the-waterline code is not ultimately necessary, the kind of stuff that if they were running a tight ship wouldn't be there. I certainly get reports like that from friends, anyhow. But it sounds like that's ultimately not an engineering problem but a management problem.
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- disgruntledphd2 3y ago
  This already happened it was called Hailo and they got destroyed by Uber et al burning cash on incentives.
  - 3y ago
diehunde 3y ago
Do you think the lack of talent is what's preventing the company's success?
kgp7 3y ago
This seems to be a common trope at HN where the failure of a company must be because of their hiring practice. Your comment also implies that the current failure has been engineering. This couldnt be further from the truth, Lyft had some of the best and smartest engineers. Lyft paid as well as they did because of the risk these engineers took in moving on from Google/Meta/Twitter what have you. FWIW, I found Lyfts interviews to be the easiest of the companies I interviewed at. The companies current downturn stems from the combined blow of COVID and focusing only on rideshare at the expense of not diversifying their revenue streams and their hiring or engineering has had very little to do with it.
- fdgsdfogijq 3y ago
  Stock based compensation is a huge drag on their expenses, to the degree that it has hurt their future. "Lyft had some of the best and smartest engineers", whats the bench mark for this? Good looking syntax in a clean code base isnt a top engineer. Delivering business value through technology is
  - db1234 3y ago
    Every company claims they have the best and the smartest engineers. Have you seen any company claiming otherwise?
    - paulcole 3y ago
      I talk about this when I do hiring. Our process isn't designed to find the best person for the job. We want to hire the first person who passes our bar for hiring. We just don't have the need or budget for the best and smartest people. But we often hire very excellent and very smart people! It's kind of like the high jump. You get the same result whether you're an inch over the bar or a foot.
      - db1234 3y ago
        Sure, that's internal messaging. I am talking about what any company publicly claims.
dymk 3y ago
Wow, I would hate to work with you. Blaming the failure oof the company on engineering of all departments. And imagine being your coworker and not know the animosity you have towards them and the compensation they negotiated. Or maybe you do show it?
PragmaticPulp 3y ago
> The interviews were just leetcode hards, I doubt the interview was literally just Leetcode. They're screening resumes and making judgment calls about who even gets to interview. They also evaluate the candidate's experience and so on. Leetcode is a gate, but it's not the only gate.
- qbasic_forever 3y ago
  It's the big gate though. No amount of experience, resume high points, etc. will overcome a failed tech screen or interview. It has stopped every single interview loop immediately that I've seen and been a part of the process. As soon as there's a "no hire" voice in the loop it's over, and the fastest way to get there is not figuring out an interviewer's tech screen question to their satisfaction.
pb7 3y ago
The Lyft service is rock solid, it's just not a very profitable business. That has nothing to do with engineering talent. Engineers need to stop being bitter about others making more money than them and start roasting the business people that fail to make the company profitable. Even if they make 1/3 of what engineers do, they fail at their primary job function and need to be let go.
- deleted 3y ago
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- disgruntledphd2 3y ago
  Taking a high salary from a structurally unprofitable company is a massive risk. This has been hidden by the endless amounts of cheap money in the last decade but it's always worth thinking about. I realised in 2016 that Uber/Lyft were never gonna print cash so I didn't work for them.
- hitekker 3y ago
  > the business people that fail to make the company profitable people who own the failure will have more luck developing their skills and becoming more marketable, than people who run away from failure and play the blame game. woe be to the contributor, manager or otherwise, who believes their little bubble of excellence will never pop.
blululu 3y ago
If you think that's bad wait till you see how much people a rung or two above that in management are getting paid without even being grilled on how to solve difficult puzzles.
paxys 3y ago
The problem isn't the engineering, it's the business. Changing the interview process isn't going to make their competition disappear or make them profitable.
MuffinFlavored 3y ago
In my experience, you usually have about 5-10 engineers on a team, reporting to a manager. Manager might report to a director who manages about 5-10 managers. Then VPs managing 5-10 directions, an SVP managing 5-10 VPs, CTO managing 5-10 SVPs, then CEO. Let's say each project touched about 20-40 people. What projects were they working on that leadership deemed 1200 employees now useless? Was it... 30 growth projects they shouldn't have been working on? 50? 100? 20? 10? Was there just not enough work going around?
subsubzero 3y ago
Why is the "bar" for hiring designed around code puzzles(leetcode). Maybe that is not a good signal for hiring at all. You are optimizing for people who just grind away at these silly puzzles vs. having domain experts who have both depth and breadth across a technology stack. I have worked with many a engineer who aced these exercises who imho was entirely unfit for working at a large tech company, their communication was absolutely terrible, and their thinking was quite flawed from a variety of perspectives when it came to systems design and operational rigor. I think we will look back on this time and think what a mistake it was to optimize for employees who were good at solving leetcode.
- boshalfoshal 3y ago
  I mean, the more senior you get the more focus you have on the stuff you describe - system design interviews, leadership interviews, etc. I know a few people that interviewed at Meta E6 for example, and they were explicitly told the leetcode interviews don't really matter as much and they are just there to make sure you can actually code. Imo Leetcode is fine for younger hires since at that point you are just looking for aptitude and/or someone who has the work ethic to grind. With that being said, Lyfts hiring practices is probably NOT why they are laying people off. This is a business issue. No amount of infrastructure or hackernews-style idealistic interviews would be able to fundamentally change their position in their business segment, especially if its just for hiring ICs. The people at lyft are plenty talented, contrary to what OP is saying.
  - subsubzero 3y ago
    yeah I agree with this 100%: > With that being said, Lyfts hiring practices is probably NOT why they are laying people off My comment was more a critique of the en-vogue hiring practice of basing a majority of a hiring decision on whether the engineering candidate can pass leetcode level X. As for why Lyft is struggling is really two-fold, not diversifying themselves besides ride-hailing really pinned them into a corner unlike their competitor Uber which branched into food delivery and other gig businesses. In addition they like many other tech companies over-hired due to pandemic money and herd mentality.
- 3y ago
asdff 3y ago
I think theres a point of compensation that you reach where you just stop caring about the work or the company. If I was being payed that much a year, I'd be thinking about retiring early and trying to leave the working stiff life in as short of time as possible since with that compensation, its actually realistic to become a feudal lord in a few years especially buying into the market in a recession and riding the wave in the following years. 2-4 years of experience tells me they are right out of college too, so if you are fine with that standard of living you could realistically be living off 20k a year or less and the rest is just banked. Then in the back of your head you think if you ever do get laid off, you now have a title that was compensated at that much on your resume and new doors open for you, which you can take time opening with your massive nest egg.
- mapme 3y ago
  Living off 20k a year in a Hcol, where these salaries primarily occur, is next to impossible. Rent alone anywhere in SF area, for example San Jose, is 2k at a bare minimum for a 1BR, or 3k for a 2BR split between a roommate at 1.5k each. That means rent is 18k-24k, not to mention other living expenses (car, utilities, food, travel to visit family, etc.)
  - asdff 3y ago
    If you went to school at say UCLA you are already used to living with a roommate in your bedroom (sometimes four). That's $1000 in san jose. Say you have a partner, now it doesn't even seem so desperate. Now you are at $12k rent alone. Fly spirit and buy the airfare long out to visit mom and dad when tickets are like $200 (i get emails for $49 spirit fares sometimes). call it $13000 with five visits home a year. Food wise you can easily do $50 a week groceries buying basic ingredients like fresh produce and rice or tortillas and beans. Now we are at about $16000 with all your needs met and about $4000 left over for any oddball expenses. SF area has bussing too, and bike lanes if you didn't want to bother with car expenses.
sangnoir 3y ago
> For reference I work at a company that requires leetcode medium/hard perfection and am appalled at the money we pay for the engineers relative to the value they bring Have you tried not paying that much and checking how much value you'll get in return? Anyone who can write code can learn to leetcode (artificial time-pressuee aside). There's nothing that sets aside leetcoders from the rest of the engineering talent pool except that they put in the time (or have a competitive programming hobby). I haven't seen any evidence that leetcoders are worse in executing, compared to those that will not (or can not) put in the time. Are companies laying off people people's they could not execute at the expected level? Or is it because of leadership strategic errors (over hiring)? Even if your assertion that engineers are overpaid is true - that is a failure of leadership. However, I don't see heads rolling in the C-suites, it's the fault of "macro-economic headwinds" they failed to see coming.
- the_overseer 3y ago
  You just said that you see no difference between people that take leetcode and those who don't So why the hell use leetcode as a filter if it doesn't filter for anything?
  - sangnoir 3y ago
    Filtering for people willing (and able) to Leetcode is the point! When you have a large talent pool, you will have to come up with a filter; and there is also an element of luck involved - but I don't think interviewers or interviewees will be happy for an offer to be hang on a coin-toss.
gofreddygo 3y ago
And companies won't learn! For how quickly most small companies seem to (or be forced to) learn on other facets, they've learned nothing about attracting and hiring the kind of engineers you want and how to keep them happy. I still see the same mistakes, the same mindset, the same process and the same result with very very few exceptions.

makestuff 3y ago

I hope this downturn gets rid of leetcode. I really have no desire to grind leetcode whenever I need a new job. I am more than happy to do system design and practical coding questions (ex: integrate with some API like Stripe does), but the leetcode stuff is ridiculous for mid-senior+ level engineers.

jmole 3y ago
I don't think it will be the downturn that eliminates it, so much as it will be LLM-accelerated coding, and the normalization and incorporation of these tools into standard development workflows. If you think co-pilot is cool now, just wait and see what it does in 5 years. A team of 10 tomorrow can probably replace a team of 50 today. So maybe the interview process in 10 years is more like: "build an auction site like ebay in the next hour."
- arthurcolle 3y ago
  > So maybe the interview process in 10 years is more like: "build an auction site like ebay in the next hour." This is very "Monkey's Paw" and I can absolutely see something like that taking hold, as sloppy and stupid as such a task might be. I had an interview with a YC company who asked me how to do something, and then I did it, and then they asked "how could I make it a one-liner" - immediately thought was "I'm pretty sure I don't want to maintain a codebase full of fun little one-liners for everything" - managed to get it, but it definitely looked like crap. If I were to get asked to build eBay in an hour, I'm sure my auction model would be 1) shit, 2) very prone to social engineering type attacks (fake bids, etc)
- fnimick 3y ago
  Who needs LLM-accelerated coding for that? Leetcode was already comically unrealistic as an evaluation of actual engineering skill. When's the last time you had to solve an algorithm puzzle without any ability to do research or check references? Shoutout to the interview I had where I was asked a tricky graph question, reasoned my way to the optimal solution, then failed because I "should have recognized" that it was a variant of Djikstra's algorithm from the beginning. As we all know, being able to regurgitate an existing algorithm shows far more promise than being able to logically create it yourself!
  - bckr 3y ago
    I think that this shows how these interviews are really just a way to not get sued for discrimination when an interviewer just doesn’t like you.
- breck 3y ago
  > If you think co-pilot is cool now, just wait and see what it does in 5 years. What will it do? It can't write exponentially better code. Maybe 50% better, so that I would need to edit it's outputs less often. The only thing I could see it doing exponentially better would be writing _less_ code. Telling me "stop! close this file. close this project. you are working on the wrong thing!" Technology can jump sharply but then go relatively flat. We still haven't gone back to the moon, 50 years later. We still don't have at-home nuclear power plants.
rcme 3y ago
I detest leetcode-style questions, but system design questions are even worse. At least leetcode-style questions have some type of objective evaluation criteria. System design questions are entirely subjective and whether or not you're successful generally comes down to whether or not your first impression of a problem matches the expectations of your interviewer. At my last company, we stopped doing system design entirely because we found it was completely uncorrelated to whether or not a candidate did well on the job.
- jkaptur 3y ago
  Did you hire people who did poorly on the system design interview and then measure their job performance? Or did you just determine that "passing with flying colors" didn't really improve job performance vs. "just scraping by"?
  - rcme 3y ago
    We moved from leetcode + system design question to project-based interview + system design question to just project based. Our project-based interviews were the main hiring criteria, and we originally planned on using system design interviews for leveling. What we found is that doing well on the project-based interview was a much better signal than the system design interview. When we used the system design interview for leveling, we under leveled certain people and over leveled others. We discovered that it would have been more accurate to only use the project interview for both making a hiring decision and leveling. Ultimately, what we had trouble with was formalizing the evaluation criteria for the system design interview. With a project interview, we formalized the requirements of the project and everyone on the loop evaluates candidates against those criteria. With the system design interview, only one person ends up evaluating each candidate and a single person's judgement is highly variable. Unless the candidate did something egregiously wrong, it was very hard to say whether or not something was strictly "bad" or "good" and it was impossible to write down the list of "bad" and "good" qualities ahead of time.
    - MichaelNolan 3y ago
      How did you structure your project based interview? Was it live pair coding, or a take home project? Did you have any trouble with candidates declining the project? My first instinct as a candidate is to turn down take home project based interviews. I almost always say no to them (especially if it’s for the 1st round) for a few reasons: One: In general they seem like a poor use of my time. I would rather do 5 one hour coding or design interviews at 5 different companies than a single 5 hour project at one company. Two: I’m skeptical that anyone is actually reviewing the submitted project. And the evaluation criteria are usually unclear. For instance is it worth it to add linters during the build process? Or to introduce caching for api responses? Will the person evaluating the project notice details like that? Lastly: Every coding or design interview carries over to the next one. Preparing for one is preparing for all of them. In contrast I’ve seen projects (for a backend role) range from “build a simple weather api, any language” to “build a sudoku solver specifically in JavaScript”.
qbasic_forever 3y ago
Unfortunately it will likely get worse in the short term. With a huge pool of laid off people fighting for a small number of open positions (especially at the senior level and above) companies can be as demanding and stupid as they want with hiring. Leet code prowess is just another screening that whittles down the work they have to do to hire--only people that study and learn those interviews will pass them so the company has to worry less about actually figuring out if someone is a good fit for the position.
diehunde 3y ago
The problem is that you and the other hundreds of senior engineers would perform the same if it were all design and the other example you gave. There's just not a good solution for companies that must evaluate the number of candidates these big companies get daily.
- rendaw 3y ago
  You can already filter out 95% of candidates with fizz buzz.
time_to_smile 3y ago
Leetcode is also just an awful signal. It would be fine if it was only problems with false negatives, but the false positive rate is through the roof. I'm consistently shocked by coworkers I've had, who I knew had to pass challenging leetcode interviews, who seem to not only know nothing about building real world software, but don't really have a firm grasp on algorithms. Yes they can process a leetcode question requiring dynamic programming in record time, but when mapping a real world problem to a dp (or any other similar solution) are completely at a loss.
lumost 3y ago
It’s a balance, an LC medium isn’t to hard to do offhand. If your business is hard tech, it’s a reasonable filter. I see diminishing returns from LC hards and greater other than as a guardrail to block management from hiring senior people who are practically no better than the junior people.
lovecg 3y ago
If you think of Leetcode and similar filters as just veiled IQ tests it makes way more sense - of course those problems don’t have much to do with actual day to day engineering. If companies could just administer IQ tests they would happily do that. Since that’s illegal, they rely on Leetcode.
- greatpostman 3y ago
  Not all iq is created equal. Creativity matters
  - anthonypasq 3y ago
    testing for creativity is much harder than testing for iq, and a high iq person with no creativity is a safer bet than a dumb creative person.
- blululu 3y ago
  It's a modified IQ test filtered through the transfer function of having a CS degree. A big part of the shade that this practice gets is from people with backgrounds that are CS adjacent who are highly intelligent, can do math at a university level and perfectly capable of writing quality production ready code are dinged because they don't know some CS 201 puzzle that is never used in practice.
  - 93po 3y ago
    Interviewing isn't just a measure of how good you are at programming in real life. It's how good of an employee you will be. Conformity is a strong indicator of this. Comparing someone who completed a CS degree versus some guy that learned to program in a garage hacking together broken computer parts - the employer is going to choose the CS degree guy, even if the hacker is better at programming. CS degree means you follow direction, you can work within a rigid structure, you follow rules enough to make good grades and not get kicked out, and you're capable of doing monotonous work that sometimes has very little value.
    - 3y ago
myth_drannon 3y ago
From reading recent interview experiences on Reddit, the thing got way worse now that you have thousands of unemployed engineers competing for scarce positions. Now it's leetcode hards AND takeaway assignment.
cwilkes 3y ago
How would the downturn get rid of leetcode? If anything it will dramatically increase its use as now there’s 100k more programmers on the market all applying for the same reduced pool of jobs. Somehow companies are going to have to now filter through a lot more candidates to fill positions, and for right now leetcode-like tests are the quickest way to get a gauge of an engineer’s performance (on leetcode). Don’t get me wrong: I think leetcode hiring depending on how it is done doesn’t result in getting the best talent.

matrix_overload 3y ago

They didn't care. They needed to show investors a plausibly looking story how they "hire the best" by having a process with >90% rejection rate, and they did.

tempsy 3y ago

I'm not sure what you mean by "even pre 2020". High comp did not just start with covid. This had been the case for many years before the pandemic.

herval 3y ago
there was a crazy spike in hiring and salaries during the pandemic, with many companies hiring whoever they could find, as fast as possible (hence with higher salaries). I'm assuming that's what OP is referring to
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wpietri 3y ago

And one of the puzzling things to me here is what all those engineers are doing. I mean, if you're making bad hiring decisions, engineers can happily create work for one another and themselves, so I get where the labor could be going. But it does not look to me like Lyft and Uber are particularly feature-filled. I suspect that if rideshare companies ever get to being profitable, we'll see the emergence of white-label rideshare software that gets made for a tiny fraction of the cost of what Lyft and Uber spend. Because that'll be an organization with a real incentive to keep costs down.

iLoveOncall 3y ago
As always with large companies, what you see as a consumer is only the tip of the iceberg. For every user-facing line of code you have a hundred or a thousand lines of code made internal-only services, for interacting with partners, for variations due to local restrictions, etc.
- wpietri 3y ago
  Sure. I mean I have some questions about your proportions, but let that pass. We clearly agree that the amount of total code is proportional to the user-facing stuff. Which for Lyft seems to be quite stable. And since the main function of developers is to improve things, that makes me wonder. I also suspect that with larger companies, a lot of that below-the-waterline code is not ultimately necessary, the kind of stuff that if they were running a tight ship wouldn't be there. I certainly get reports like that from friends, anyhow. But it sounds like that's ultimately not an engineering problem but a management problem.
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disgruntledphd2 3y ago
This already happened it was called Hailo and they got destroyed by Uber et al burning cash on incentives.
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diehunde 3y ago

Do you think the lack of talent is what's preventing the company's success?

kgp7 3y ago

This seems to be a common trope at HN where the failure of a company must be because of their hiring practice. Your comment also implies that the current failure has been engineering. This couldnt be further from the truth, Lyft had some of the best and smartest engineers. Lyft paid as well as they did because of the risk these engineers took in moving on from Google/Meta/Twitter what have you. FWIW, I found Lyfts interviews to be the easiest of the companies I interviewed at. The companies current downturn stems from the combined blow of COVID and focusing only on rideshare at the expense of not diversifying their revenue streams and their hiring or engineering has had very little to do with it.

fdgsdfogijq 3y ago
Stock based compensation is a huge drag on their expenses, to the degree that it has hurt their future. "Lyft had some of the best and smartest engineers", whats the bench mark for this? Good looking syntax in a clean code base isnt a top engineer. Delivering business value through technology is
- db1234 3y ago
  Every company claims they have the best and the smartest engineers. Have you seen any company claiming otherwise?
  - paulcole 3y ago
    I talk about this when I do hiring. Our process isn't designed to find the best person for the job. We want to hire the first person who passes our bar for hiring. We just don't have the need or budget for the best and smartest people. But we often hire very excellent and very smart people! It's kind of like the high jump. You get the same result whether you're an inch over the bar or a foot.
    - db1234 3y ago
      Sure, that's internal messaging. I am talking about what any company publicly claims.

dymk 3y ago

Wow, I would hate to work with you. Blaming the failure oof the company on engineering of all departments. And imagine being your coworker and not know the animosity you have towards them and the compensation they negotiated. Or maybe you do show it?

PragmaticPulp 3y ago

> The interviews were just leetcode hards, I doubt the interview was literally just Leetcode. They're screening resumes and making judgment calls about who even gets to interview. They also evaluate the candidate's experience and so on. Leetcode is a gate, but it's not the only gate.

qbasic_forever 3y ago
It's the big gate though. No amount of experience, resume high points, etc. will overcome a failed tech screen or interview. It has stopped every single interview loop immediately that I've seen and been a part of the process. As soon as there's a "no hire" voice in the loop it's over, and the fastest way to get there is not figuring out an interviewer's tech screen question to their satisfaction.

pb7 3y ago

The Lyft service is rock solid, it's just not a very profitable business. That has nothing to do with engineering talent. Engineers need to stop being bitter about others making more money than them and start roasting the business people that fail to make the company profitable. Even if they make 1/3 of what engineers do, they fail at their primary job function and need to be let go.

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disgruntledphd2 3y ago
Taking a high salary from a structurally unprofitable company is a massive risk. This has been hidden by the endless amounts of cheap money in the last decade but it's always worth thinking about. I realised in 2016 that Uber/Lyft were never gonna print cash so I didn't work for them.
hitekker 3y ago
> the business people that fail to make the company profitable people who own the failure will have more luck developing their skills and becoming more marketable, than people who run away from failure and play the blame game. woe be to the contributor, manager or otherwise, who believes their little bubble of excellence will never pop.

blululu 3y ago

If you think that's bad wait till you see how much people a rung or two above that in management are getting paid without even being grilled on how to solve difficult puzzles.

paxys 3y ago

The problem isn't the engineering, it's the business. Changing the interview process isn't going to make their competition disappear or make them profitable.

MuffinFlavored 3y ago

In my experience, you usually have about 5-10 engineers on a team, reporting to a manager. Manager might report to a director who manages about 5-10 managers. Then VPs managing 5-10 directions, an SVP managing 5-10 VPs, CTO managing 5-10 SVPs, then CEO. Let's say each project touched about 20-40 people. What projects were they working on that leadership deemed 1200 employees now useless? Was it... 30 growth projects they shouldn't have been working on? 50? 100? 20? 10? Was there just not enough work going around?

subsubzero 3y ago

Why is the "bar" for hiring designed around code puzzles(leetcode). Maybe that is not a good signal for hiring at all. You are optimizing for people who just grind away at these silly puzzles vs. having domain experts who have both depth and breadth across a technology stack. I have worked with many a engineer who aced these exercises who imho was entirely unfit for working at a large tech company, their communication was absolutely terrible, and their thinking was quite flawed from a variety of perspectives when it came to systems design and operational rigor. I think we will look back on this time and think what a mistake it was to optimize for employees who were good at solving leetcode.

boshalfoshal 3y ago
I mean, the more senior you get the more focus you have on the stuff you describe - system design interviews, leadership interviews, etc. I know a few people that interviewed at Meta E6 for example, and they were explicitly told the leetcode interviews don't really matter as much and they are just there to make sure you can actually code. Imo Leetcode is fine for younger hires since at that point you are just looking for aptitude and/or someone who has the work ethic to grind. With that being said, Lyfts hiring practices is probably NOT why they are laying people off. This is a business issue. No amount of infrastructure or hackernews-style idealistic interviews would be able to fundamentally change their position in their business segment, especially if its just for hiring ICs. The people at lyft are plenty talented, contrary to what OP is saying.
- subsubzero 3y ago
  yeah I agree with this 100%: > With that being said, Lyfts hiring practices is probably NOT why they are laying people off My comment was more a critique of the en-vogue hiring practice of basing a majority of a hiring decision on whether the engineering candidate can pass leetcode level X. As for why Lyft is struggling is really two-fold, not diversifying themselves besides ride-hailing really pinned them into a corner unlike their competitor Uber which branched into food delivery and other gig businesses. In addition they like many other tech companies over-hired due to pandemic money and herd mentality.
3y ago

asdff 3y ago

I think theres a point of compensation that you reach where you just stop caring about the work or the company. If I was being payed that much a year, I'd be thinking about retiring early and trying to leave the working stiff life in as short of time as possible since with that compensation, its actually realistic to become a feudal lord in a few years especially buying into the market in a recession and riding the wave in the following years. 2-4 years of experience tells me they are right out of college too, so if you are fine with that standard of living you could realistically be living off 20k a year or less and the rest is just banked. Then in the back of your head you think if you ever do get laid off, you now have a title that was compensated at that much on your resume and new doors open for you, which you can take time opening with your massive nest egg.

mapme 3y ago
Living off 20k a year in a Hcol, where these salaries primarily occur, is next to impossible. Rent alone anywhere in SF area, for example San Jose, is 2k at a bare minimum for a 1BR, or 3k for a 2BR split between a roommate at 1.5k each. That means rent is 18k-24k, not to mention other living expenses (car, utilities, food, travel to visit family, etc.)
- asdff 3y ago
  If you went to school at say UCLA you are already used to living with a roommate in your bedroom (sometimes four). That's $1000 in san jose. Say you have a partner, now it doesn't even seem so desperate. Now you are at $12k rent alone. Fly spirit and buy the airfare long out to visit mom and dad when tickets are like $200 (i get emails for $49 spirit fares sometimes). call it $13000 with five visits home a year. Food wise you can easily do $50 a week groceries buying basic ingredients like fresh produce and rice or tortillas and beans. Now we are at about $16000 with all your needs met and about $4000 left over for any oddball expenses. SF area has bussing too, and bike lanes if you didn't want to bother with car expenses.

sangnoir 3y ago

> For reference I work at a company that requires leetcode medium/hard perfection and am appalled at the money we pay for the engineers relative to the value they bring Have you tried not paying that much and checking how much value you'll get in return? Anyone who can write code can learn to leetcode (artificial time-pressuee aside). There's nothing that sets aside leetcoders from the rest of the engineering talent pool except that they put in the time (or have a competitive programming hobby). I haven't seen any evidence that leetcoders are worse in executing, compared to those that will not (or can not) put in the time. Are companies laying off people people's they could not execute at the expected level? Or is it because of leadership strategic errors (over hiring)? Even if your assertion that engineers are overpaid is true - that is a failure of leadership. However, I don't see heads rolling in the C-suites, it's the fault of "macro-economic headwinds" they failed to see coming.

the_overseer 3y ago
You just said that you see no difference between people that take leetcode and those who don't So why the hell use leetcode as a filter if it doesn't filter for anything?
- sangnoir 3y ago
  Filtering for people willing (and able) to Leetcode is the point! When you have a large talent pool, you will have to come up with a filter; and there is also an element of luck involved - but I don't think interviewers or interviewees will be happy for an offer to be hang on a coin-toss.

gofreddygo 3y ago

And companies won't learn! For how quickly most small companies seem to (or be forced to) learn on other facets, they've learned nothing about attracting and hiring the kind of engineers you want and how to keep them happy. I still see the same mistakes, the same mindset, the same process and the same result with very very few exceptions.