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Leetcode style interviews probably serve two functions: 1) A way to suppress wages and job mobility for SWE. Who wants to switch jobs when it means studying fo

Leetcode style interviews probably serve two functions: 1) A way to suppress wages and job mobility for SWE. Who wants to switch jobs when it means studying for a month or two? Also, if you get unlucky and some try hard drops an atomic LC hard bomb on you now you have an entire company you can no longer apply to for a year. 2) A way to mask bias in the process while claiming that it’s a fair process because everyone has a clear/similar objective. Meet someone who went to your Alma mater? Same gender? Same race? Give them the same question as everyone else, but hint them through it, ignore some syntax errors, and give them a strong hire for “communication” when they didn’t even implement the optimal approach… Or is it someone you don’t like for X reason? Drop a leetcode hard on them and send them packing and just remain silent the entire interview. To the company this is acceptable noise, but to the individual, this is costing us 100s of thousands of dollars, because there’s only a handful of companies that pay well and they all have the same interview process. Failing 3 interviews probably means you’re now out $200-300k of additional compensation from the top paying companies. I’ve interviewed for and at FAANGs. I can’t believe the low bar of people that we’ve hired, while simultaneously seeing insane ridiculous quad tree/number theory type questions that have caused other great engineers to miss out on good opportunities. Someone will reply to me “if you know how to problem solve you will always pass.” Ok, come interview with me and I will ask you verbatim one of those quad tree/number theory/inclusion exclusion principle questions and I’d love to see you squirm, meanwhile another candidate is asked a basic hash map question.

emodendroket 2y ago
I'm sure anyone determined to do so can act unfairly regardless of what process is in place, but the fact that there is a standardized test in my mind does the opposite and makes the process much fairer. Assuming a fair-minded interviewer, the process gives a chance to a candidate whose resume may have less vaunted names on it to demonstrate their skill. I'm quite sure that I'd never have had some of the opportunities I have, not having a CS degree, if it weren't for whiteboarding interviews. I can't imagine any possible process that would thwart interviewers intentionally subverting it to hire their friends.
- Benjammer 2y ago
  So are we just going with a base assumption that interviewers can NEVER be trusted with anti-bias training and learning how evaluate people fairly? The examples mentioned in this comment section are all blatantly intentional biases that people are choosing to use. The amazing part is that all the “standard test eliminates bias” people seem to the most ignorant to where bias helps THEM. Forcing people to study for two months is blatantly discriminatory to age and family status, at a systemic level. While “this white straight guy might explicitly choose to give the other white straight guy an easy question,” is very subjective and intentional on the individual level. Like, employees can always choose to do bad things, in any situation. That’s why we have at-will employment… Is the culture just so broken at these companies that it’s hopeless to expect people NOT to blatantly exploit the system for their friends? Why don’t people get fired for doing that?
  - Aunche 2y ago
    > Forcing people to study for two months is blatantly discriminatory to age and family status, at a systemic level. How is this any less discriminatory than any other assessment based interview where you need to prepare? Non-assessment based interviews end up being vibes based which is much more discriminatory.
    - angoragoats 2y ago
      You’ve set up a false dichotomy here; for any given position, there is typically a way to conduct an assessment-based interview that doesn’t require too much preparation for qualified candidates. For example, at my current job, we hire web developers with Rails experience. Our technical interview process consists of either a pair programming session or an async/take-home task (candidate’s choice) which requires the candidate to implement a small feature in a Rails codebase. We do have some room to improve on objective evaluation of the candidate’s performance, but there is a test suite and a rubric which we use to evaluate their work. None of this should require that the candidate study, unless they’re coming in to the interview without Rails experience.
kbar13 2y ago
yeah i agree that "if you know how to problem solve you will pass" statement is a joke. you absolutely need to memorize most of these problems as you'll never encounter them out in the real world. i think we need to get better at the behavioral side of interviewing - this should be the juice of getting at whether or not an engineer is good. and if they're really good at lying... CEO material? lol.
yieldcrv 2y ago
wait, can Lisa Khan at the FTC attack this too?
- lr4444lr 2y ago
  Nah, this will be an EEOC bogeyman.
boshalfoshal 2y ago
The problem you are describing is interview variance and hiring bias, not leetcode. This happens irrespective of interview style. Many companies have question banks that are specially designed to be fair/have some contextual relevance (ideally) to some "realistic" problem. Or at least, many of the companies I've interviewed at follow this model. I consider these coding questions to be "leetcode" style because at the end of the day they are an isolated coding problem, even though they may not be a problem from leetcode verbatim. Companies that execute on that style of interview well are generally fairly pleasant interviews, at least in my experience. Good companies/interviewers will gauge more than just the final code to determine a hire or no hire. And a large portion of companies also have hiring ratings on a scale to make it less binary.
- kidintech 2y ago
  Question banks that are too big: huge variance, and OP's point stands. Question banks that are too small: leaked on eastern forums immediately, candidates show up reading answers out to you (some of the guides include guidance on when to pretend to think, I am not kidding). The idealized version of "question banks" might work. The real one does not; you'd require employees constantly scouring forums in every language known to mankind, immediately removing anything that gets leaked. On top of that you'd probably require a competent committee overseeing all questions in the bank constantly and ensuring the lack of variance in difficulty. Source: I interviewed at and for Goog and Pltr.
  - boshalfoshal 2y ago
    I agree with you, but I don't really see how this invalidates the style of interviews where you're presented with some timeboxed coding problem (of reasonably scaled difficulty) and are asked to solve it. There will be bad actors regardless of the interview style, thats why companies have multiple interview types/styles/rounds to sus out a candidate, as you probably know. If they BSed their way through a leetcode interview, then they probably won't make it past a behavioral interview where they have to go in depth on some past project. And if they BSed that as well as every other round, then hey maybe they are crafty enough to succeed at the actual job.
choppaface 2y ago
Engineers typically optimize for their own learning, and the false negative rate can reflect more about how aggressively the interviewing panel wants specific peers versus how much they actually want the job done well. Suppose there was a SWE union and the union has to create their own reference compensation bands. Would the union again lean towards leetcode or some other standardized test? Or just use years of experience and maybe past projects? When weighing the “effectiveness” of leetcode interviews, it’s important to weigh that thus far SWEs have failed to effectively unionize despite e.g. the past class-action no-poaches clearly showing C-suites should be paying engineers a larger share.
ownagefool 2y ago
I don't think the problem is the format, i.e. a 30-50 minute interview on simple coding with DS&A problems, but the escalation. The reality is, fizz buzz got us 75% of the way there. It turns out when pressed, a lot of people can't write code. Yes, there's false positives, but there's also people brute focing their way through via copy & paste. This doesn't manifest as a person who can't do any task, just as a person that's slow, delivers weird abstractions, and would take a lot of your time to get anything useful from. But those people are also making those arguments, because, as you said, there's hundreds of thousands of dollars in it.
- sjaak 2y ago
  I've also used FizzBuzz at several companies, and the insane amount of people it filters out continues to boggle my mind.
  - XorNot 2y ago
    Do you tell them what the "mod" operator is before giving it? The failure rate of FizzBuzz has always struck me as depending on the idea that you can do a lot of programming and just never need that operator.
    - sensanaty 2y ago
      Yeah I know how to implement FizzBuzz since it's such a meme, but I've basically never used the mod operator in real code. Maybe it comes up in more math-y code I suppose, but for most backend/frontend/SQL code I've never reached for it.
      - stefan_ 2y ago
        More mathy code like checking if a number is even or splitting a total number of seconds into minutes and seconds?
      - vundercind 2y ago
        I’ve used it for coloring alternating lines differently in UI code, and as a lazy way to log only every so many times some loop runs. I only know it well because it was covered near the beginning of one of the first programming books I picked up (on Perl 5) and it stuck with me because it seemed wild to me that they had an operator for that.
robbyiq999 2y ago
I totally agree with A and B and have further suspected they use leetcode as a means to support a H1B candidates employment prospects (for those who do pass)
sethammons 2y ago
There is no grand conspiracy. People try to develop what they feel is a fair interview with good signals. It simply turns out that many people are not good at that and have biases that they may not even be aware of. Tackle on some cargo culting and "best practices" and you have your typical broken process. For those wondering what the alternative is to leetcode: a work sample test. Take a real problem your team solved recently, distill it down to remove internal-specific knowledge, and give candidates 3x the time to solve it compared to what it takes an internal dev to solve. Bonus points for having a rubric guide the scoring.
aqme28 2y ago
I don't buy the analysis on 1). Leetcode interviews restrict the pool of SWEs. You have a lot of SWEs who fail to qualify any more, but the few that do are more coveted and get to command higher wages
yobbo 2y ago
What about a type of blind interview where neither of the two know the problem or solution in advance. After, their solution is blindly reviewed/graded by a third party. - Input from the interviewer reflects communication ability, cultural fit, and so on of the candidate. - Input from the blind grader reflects ability of them as a team. - Low grades count against the interviewer as well. Bingo; now both are stakeholders in success.
- eschneider 2y ago
  This is very much like the "real world" situation. OTOH, I think this leaves the interviewee even more vulnerable to the unfortunate situation where they correctly solve the problem but the interviewer is convinced that a different, wrong solution is correct. Live long enough and you'll have that happen to you. OTOH, seeing how the interviewer reacts to that situation will tell you a lot about whether you really want to work there.
wruza 2y ago
Naive questions ahead, if hires weren’t made scarce by some absurd filter, why would they pay $200-300k extra? Feels like the whole idea of stellar salaries must be based on something stellar. Afair, before Google(?) made it normal, developers were sort of dirt cheap. Weren’t developers in abundance at all times?
- palata 2y ago
  The reason they pay $200-300k extra is to attract the best they can. Say you got the same salary working in an ethical company than in a FAANG, would you go for the FAANG? The absurd filter is just some kind of lottery. They could have a different one: at the end of the day, it's only when the person starts working that you can actually see what they are worth. The thing with a filter like this one is that it filters out a whole category of people who may actually be good. And it reinforces itself: you hire people who are good at leetcode, who will themselves possibly be good at hiring people who are good at leetcode. Does a company of leetcoders perform better than a company made of a diversity of good engineers? Not clear.
  - wruza 2y ago
    I agree with this. But the root commenter talks about it as something these people are worth, when it’s just that - a lottery. A company that has so much money that they don’t know which barrier to put there to stop the flood. You jump through absurd hoops and join the club. Kinda like being accepted into a cool kids league, but activities are the same.
  - CoastalCoder 2y ago
    > Say you got the same salary working in an ethical company than in a FAANG, would you go for the FAANG? Very much a tangent, but what do you mean by a company being "ethical"? I have a few concerns about how that term is often used in these discussions: (1) it's treated as a binary quality, rather than some kind of continuum, and (2) there's rarely a recognition that different persons have different conceptions of what's ethical, let alone a justification for what the writer's preferred definition is uniquely superior.
Tainnor 2y ago
> To the company this is acceptable noise, but to the individual, this is costing us 100s of thousands of dollars, because there’s only a handful of companies that pay well and they all have the same interview process. If you want to earn top money, you gotta play the game. This is true in every profession, you think lawyers that want to work at top law firms have it any easier? There's a lot of valid criticism with respect to today's tech hiring practices (especially because it doesn't only affect top paying companies), but I don't feel like "I can't get ridiculously wealthy without selling my soul" is a particularly compelling one.
- 7thpower 2y ago
  Although I find it disappointing, this is the truth. It is a function of supply and demand. There is always a gating function when you have an abundance of supply; sometimes it is leetcode, sometimes it is school, take home work, resume formatting, a mixture, all of the above, etc. Everything is a proxy because, in most scenarios, there is no way to understand effectiveness of an employee until they have worked for you for a while. Of course there are other ways, but they all carry their own risks. That’s why referrals, imperfect as they are, carry so much sway. In theory they reduce uncertainty and require some expenditure of political capital.
weatherlite 2y ago
> if you get unlucky and some try hard drops an atomic LC hard bomb on you now you have an entire company you can no longer apply to for a year. I don't think this is an issue of bad luck, its quite probably to get difficult interviews especially if you're applying to the popular names.
vundercind 2y ago
The proof of some of this is that these companies could come up with a standardized test maybe with, say, smaller-scale refreshers every few years (this is normal in some professional certs) and save a ton of money if it were really about ensuring a base level of competence using these sorts of questions as the yardstick. But that would dramatically increase worker mobility, for one thing. So they don’t do that. (“No it’s because they don’t want you to be able to test prep” that makes no sense because 99% of the way to prep for these is… exactly like test prep)
mike_tyson 2y ago
part of the problem is saturation in the job market. higher education, even job experience is no longer considered a sufficient barrier to entry. reminds me when the guy who wrote homebrew failed the apple interview. if i recall. ironic because they use brew so much internally.
noodleman 2y ago
This is a good assessment. 1 and 2 are why the system won't change, but I don't think they were intentionally designed with that in mind. I think it's a hang over from academia, bearing in mind how many of the top engineers at FAANG are PhDs. Well, that and how almost nobody who successfully finds employment after "grinding" leetcodes wants to remove the barriers for entry. I think Leetcoders can't envisage a better way to assess someone than by subjecting them to the same kind of hoop-jumping you get made to do in university. They're not interviewing you for a job as there's no module on interviewing candidates on the CS curriculum, and don't have much professional experience outside of academics or software engineering. They're simulating a dissertation defence, because that's how they were assessed for their competence. That's my charitable interpretation. If I'm being cynical, it's elitism - a way of making sure you're "one of us" (read: obnoxiously academic, Type-A personality, "logic over feelings").
- KaiserPro 2y ago
  > how many of the top engineers at FAANG are PhDs. Not that many, but its interesting how many are from "elite" universities. I'm in a research org for a FAANG and we often get to see all the handwringing about how we can't recruit more of people type x. Well, if you only hire from MIT, Stanford, Oxford etc, then they are all going to look the same. For those outside the research org, its a bit better, but its still the most uneven place I've worked.
jboggan 2y ago
3) It's also a form of hazing to make the engineers conducting the interview feel better about their current station.
simplefish 2y ago
I interviewed at a company known for consistently asking one of the same four questions in a specific interview round. These questions were widely shared on forums like Blind, Leetcode, and Glassdoor. The recruiters also provided strong guidance on the type of problems to expect. I prepared thoroughly for all four main questions and any other plausible ones I could think of. I practiced writing solutions to ensure I was fast enough for the interview. Additionally, I pre-prepared ideal answers for each question in case I got stuck. When the interview came, I got a total curveball: a question that was significantly harder than the usual ones. It didn't fit the round's theme (it was a DSA question, but I'd already aced the DSA round), was obscure enough not to be on LeetCode, and required writing a solver for a hard variant of a known algorithm. I panicked, copied the prompt into ChatGPT (despite being instructed not to use it), transcribed the result, and pretended I had recently studied the relevant algorithm. I passed the round, nailed the other interviews, got the offer, and accepted. Later, I found out that interviewers are instructed to pick one of four specific questions for that round, and the one I got wasn't in the list. I'm left wondering if the interviewer was trying to sink me or was just bored with the usual questions. The whole experience raised several questions for me: Is it cheating if I already had pre-prepared answers for the questions they were supposed to ask? What's the difference between using pre-prepared answers and using Google or ChatGPT during the interview? If the interview had gone according to plan, what was I actually demonstrating? My ability to use Google? When the interviewer asked an impossibly difficult question, I would have failed if I answered it legit, even though I'm a good engineer. Failing such an unfair interview round doesn't serve the company's interests. What is this interview process meant to demonstrate? My true value as an engineer lies in my ability to communicate clearly, think outside the box, identify and address technical tradeoffs, mentor juniors, and propose technical solutions that meet requirements while minimizing risks. Yet, I'm expected to solve a hard variant of the Traveling Salesman Problem in 45 minutes or I don't get the job? Why? The whole process seems broken, but I'm not sure how to fix it.
- weatherlite 2y ago
  How did you do it without them noticing, you weren't sharing your screen ?
- 2y ago
mateus1 2y ago
This reads very similarly to consulting case interview questions. 1) It requires a lot of free time beforehand to study the frameworks so it filters intent but also removes those who need to work and 2) it seems objective on the surface but you can essentially pick winners by choosing difficulty and nudging along.
bambax 2y ago
I'm not sure there's so much agency in any of this. Most of it is probably cargo-culting. Every software shop wants to be Google, so they do what Google does (or what they think Google is doing). It doesn't matter if they do it well, or understand (or agree with) the ultimate purpose of the process. If Google engineers all wore pink robes and top hats while interviewing then we'd see that everywhere.
lijok 2y ago
I think you’re overthinking it. Hanlon’s razor applies - the industry as a whole is incompetent at interviewing. And to be clear I’m not being smug here - every time I’ve ran recruitment rounds the interview process was a mess. It’s an extremely difficult equation to balance and as an industry we have never made the commitment to figure out a golden standard for how to do it.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
>because there’s only a handful of companies that pay well If this was just FAANG I wouldn't even mind it. Bigger compensation means bigger hoops to jump through, artificial or otherwise. At least those bigger companies come with interview guides. But I've been dropped Leetcode mediums on some Unity game dev jobs barely paying 40/hr with minimal benefits. Game interviews already have an absurd number of topics to try and guess you'll be quizzed on. (last interview wanted low level C memory/bit manipulation question... the one before that did Unreal Engine trivia... then the one before that decided to give me vector math and ray intersection questions), adding in random string manipulation questions when you will barely use more than concatenation on the job doesn't help with studying.
- bena 2y ago
  If you are applying for game dev jobs, C memory management, the gnarly parts of Unreal engine, vector math, and ray intersection are all things you could be doing on the job. Game dev is lower paying, less structured, and more involved than typical web dev jobs. I’d really only want to get into game dev early in my career or as an independent creator. It’s a touch exploitative.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    It sure is. I could also be questionied on: - CPU/GPU architecture - graphics/shader programming ( I do enjoy graphics programming, but I have been asked these questions despite not applying for graphics roles) - GPGPU - traditional software engineering (programming patterns, architecture) - netcode (I never applied to a network engineering position. I in fact actively avoid that part of the stack) - general industry questions (what kinds of bugs can appear on shipping build that may not appear on debug builds?) - a myriad of gameplay programming paradigms - coding tests in Unity, despite applying for an unreal engine position (this has in fact happened twice now. I know Unity, but come on: can you imagine getting a javascript test for a c++ position?). I've been asked all of these in some capacity over the years. At what point is it on me for not being some sort of omni net/graphics/engine gamedev that can answer any question on the fly, and not on the company for being paranoid about professionals studying for the skills they are clearly seeking? If someone can "study for your interview", why wouldn't you want that person? That's what they do on the job after all. > I’d really only want to get into game dev early in my career or as an independent creator. I'm already 8 years in, so a bit late for that. My plan is eventually to go indie, but I need a bit more time in my career before making that jump. Despite the common advice c. 2022, getting a boring cushy tech job right now isn't very viable, so may as well stick to what I'm actually getting interviews for.
dukeyukey 2y ago
> “if you know how to problem solve you will always pass.” See, this is true eventually. But it's _definitely_ not true in 45 minutes.
bena 2y ago
We’re hiring for an entry level position where I work. So entry level, that their first month is going to be dedicated to simply learning the framework we use. However, we do require a base level of competency. We give out a 40-ish minute assessment. Two multiple choice and three coding problems. And they’re easy. One of them is essentially “John has a 5 gallon bucket and 3 gallon bucket, how many buckets does he have?”. All you have to do is rewrite the clearly labeled circuit diagram as a Boolean expression. Not a single person this round has passed. Several have failed the simple ones. So while grilling people on the minutiae of a language or asking them to solve the traveling salesman is not beneficial, neither is nothing. We should be testing floors, not ceilings
martindbp 2y ago
It's also a great way to filter out anyone who has any kind of commitment like kids, aging parents to take care of, or have health issues themselves that makes it hard to cram leet code non stop on top of a busy career. For companies this is very rational, you want non-distracted employees who can work over time.
- hobs 2y ago
  It's really not that rational unless you want someone only familiar with being the top code monkey. In all my years of sw dev the number of times that would have helped vs being able to communicate and manage expectations across a swath of people is like 1:1000.
  - slavapestov 2y ago
    To be fair, you need at least one person on the team to do the actual work, while everyone else is “communicating and managing expectations”.
    - bandyaboot 2y ago
      It’s actually possible for members of the team to be capable of doing “actual work” in addition to being good communicators.
    - pavel_lishin 2y ago
      That statement is not untrue, but I think it over-estimates how much of the "actual work" is banging out code, vs. making sure the correct code is being written.
      - ryandrake 2y ago
        Yea, I've worked in a place where it was just "coders coding" and nobody was communicating and managing expectations, and that was its own unique form of awful. You need both.
bdangubic 2y ago
> there’s only a handful of companies that pay well with all due respect I believe this is about as far from the truth as it gets. I believe the issue is that people think they have to work at FAANGs in order to be paid REALLY well which is just nuts. I know many people making (very) high 6 figures working at places most have never heard of. instead of looking for FAANGs people should be looking at companies that have been in business for 20+ years (if publicly-traded company the easiest "measure" would be whether you would invest your own dough into that company) and then make your self indispensable there (this is much easier than it sounds) to a point where you are more valuable to the company they company is to you. This is un-achievable at FAANG but this should be everyone's career goal. once you are worth more to a company then company is to you, compensation-wise sky is the limit :)
- ZephyrBlu 2y ago
  > I know many people making (very) high 6 figures working at places most have never heard of You know people making ~800-900k at places most people have never heard of? That is what "high 6 figures" means. I have to assume you mean more like ~$180-190k?
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Not op, but FWIW, I know people who make high six figures (explicitly, $750k>) at companies that aren't household names or FAANG(ish) companies (or AI companies for that matter), though I also know my share of people that are at such companies that most people, or maybe just people here have heard of, that also make > $750k. Some of them aren't even software engineers! Most (all?) of them aren't paid that much on their W2 though and have lucked out with stock options/RSUs/related compensation (again, at non-FAANG companies, some private). Not trying to brag that I have well-paid friends, though it might come across that way; just corroborating the fact that it's possible for late-career professionals to make that kind of money at non-FAANG companies.
    - ZephyrBlu 2y ago
      I 100% believe it's possible, but that's even more of a lottery than FAANG is which would negate his point :). If you can get your foot in the door it's hard to beat FAANG comp on a risk-adjusted basis and they do actually employ quite a lot of SWEs, which I think is why it's such a focal point for tech jobs even though you can get similar comp in other situations.
valicord 2y ago
> I will ask you verbatim one of those quad tree/number theory/inclusion exclusion principle questions Why don't you list them here to illustrate your point?
tgv 2y ago
> this is costing us 100s of thousands of dollars That depends very much on your world view. If you get the job, it would imply you've just cost a lot of other people $100ks. That simply can't be true, because there's a small number of such jobs. The only way this can possibly hold is if you hold that only the "best" candidate should get the job, and by "best" you mean: the one that gets most of the leetcode questions right. But then there's no us. Edit: I'm not in favor of leetcode interviews, and I do understand that there's a bias in interviews (which won't go away when you drop the leetcode).
JKCalhoun 2y ago
Leetcode feels meritocratic. I suspect many people (engineers perhaps more so) don't trust their ability to "size someone up" from 45 minutes of casual conversation alone. Or worse, they worry that they'll have to defend their hire/donthire based on what amounts to a casual conversation whereby they were trying to judge character, affability, confidence, drive, motivation.... Leetcode is lazy, easy.
azangru 2y ago
> Meet someone who went to your Alma mater? Same gender? Same race? Give them the same question as everyone else, but hint them through it, ignore some syntax errors, and give them a strong hire for “communication” when they didn’t even implement the optimal approach… I do not know how hiring is done at megacorps; but on the few occasions I participated in tech interviews, we were looking for candidates to join the team that I was on. So, what I was interested about the candidates was how well they were prepared for the kind of work our team does; and how much I would like to work with them. I am sure this second question introduces all sorts of subjective biases; but then, hey, aren't you going to spend countless future hours with that person? At least the first concern incentivised us to make sure candidates were sufficiently competent. BTW, we didn't ask leetcode-type questions. > but to the individual, this is costing us 100s of thousands of dollars, because there’s only a handful of companies that pay well and they all have the same interview process I am not sure I am following the argument. If there is only a handful of companies that pay well, and if you only consider companies out of that list for employment, isn't it reasonable to predict that there will be lots of other candidates who want the same, far more than the number of available positions at those companies. How, then, should those companies select from such a pool of candidates?
tzs 2y ago
> A way to suppress wages and job mobility for SWE. Who wants to switch jobs when it means studying for a month or two? If what Google search tells me is true the average SWE tenure is only a couple of years or so. I might need a month or two of study (or more!) to be able to handle the harder Leetcode problems, but if I was expecting to have to do this every couple of years or so I'd consider taking some steps to maintain that knowledge between jobs. That would probably be considerably less overall effort than forgetting it and having to cram for months every couple of years.
FabHK 2y ago
And you think without leetcode questions the despicable biased interviewer from your example would not be able to hire someone from their Alma mater over someone else?
wegfawefgawefg 2y ago
Casual gamedev here. Ive written like 100 quadtrees from scratch so its a goto algorithm Ive got down by memory. I used to think this datastructure was very basic and common because young gamedevs often share it online with eachother. Highschoolers etc. One time in a technical interview I realized a quadtree would solve the problem they were asking. I also happened to be reading SICP and practical common lisp on the plane on the way over to the interview. (specifically the sql sdl macro chapter) Unfortunately this gave me an idea. I narrated, sketched out and pseudocoded a plist based quadtree on the whiteboard and felt pretty good about myself. I turned around to see my interviewers were not impressed. Actually they thought I was an idiot. They didnt know what a quadtree was, and they were quite upset I used "tuples". I assured them its very efficient, and that the compiler would take care of "the tuples". They failed me. Moral of the story don't use common lisp in a javascript interview.
gofreddygo 2y ago
> A way to suppress wages > A way to mask bias > Same gender? Same race? > someone you don’t like Ok fair points. it really could be a thing when you've already decided and are just playing around the process. But ya'know even when there isn't an inherent bias from race, gender, alma maters and overall like ability, the whole tech interview process still sucks. The shit soup presented at a coding interview, leetcode or take home style ones are a result of wholesale cargo cult stupidity than malice. There's no incentive at any level in BigCo. Margins are too big for top level to care. its hard to measure, middle management layer can easily fudge metrics while driving the org effectively into the ground. Lower layer that made it through the filter, sick of this grind and are busy filing tasks sipping free coffee. The elephant in the room is that you cannot make hiring a process driven activity. This is org level dysfunction. There's more such exhibits - DEI, promo criteria, ERGs, re-org politics, vendor selection to name a few.

emodendroket 2y ago

I'm sure anyone determined to do so can act unfairly regardless of what process is in place, but the fact that there is a standardized test in my mind does the opposite and makes the process much fairer. Assuming a fair-minded interviewer, the process gives a chance to a candidate whose resume may have less vaunted names on it to demonstrate their skill. I'm quite sure that I'd never have had some of the opportunities I have, not having a CS degree, if it weren't for whiteboarding interviews. I can't imagine any possible process that would thwart interviewers intentionally subverting it to hire their friends.

Benjammer 2y ago
So are we just going with a base assumption that interviewers can NEVER be trusted with anti-bias training and learning how evaluate people fairly? The examples mentioned in this comment section are all blatantly intentional biases that people are choosing to use. The amazing part is that all the “standard test eliminates bias” people seem to the most ignorant to where bias helps THEM. Forcing people to study for two months is blatantly discriminatory to age and family status, at a systemic level. While “this white straight guy might explicitly choose to give the other white straight guy an easy question,” is very subjective and intentional on the individual level. Like, employees can always choose to do bad things, in any situation. That’s why we have at-will employment… Is the culture just so broken at these companies that it’s hopeless to expect people NOT to blatantly exploit the system for their friends? Why don’t people get fired for doing that?
- Aunche 2y ago
  > Forcing people to study for two months is blatantly discriminatory to age and family status, at a systemic level. How is this any less discriminatory than any other assessment based interview where you need to prepare? Non-assessment based interviews end up being vibes based which is much more discriminatory.
  - angoragoats 2y ago
    You’ve set up a false dichotomy here; for any given position, there is typically a way to conduct an assessment-based interview that doesn’t require too much preparation for qualified candidates. For example, at my current job, we hire web developers with Rails experience. Our technical interview process consists of either a pair programming session or an async/take-home task (candidate’s choice) which requires the candidate to implement a small feature in a Rails codebase. We do have some room to improve on objective evaluation of the candidate’s performance, but there is a test suite and a rubric which we use to evaluate their work. None of this should require that the candidate study, unless they’re coming in to the interview without Rails experience.

kbar13 2y ago

yeah i agree that "if you know how to problem solve you will pass" statement is a joke. you absolutely need to memorize most of these problems as you'll never encounter them out in the real world. i think we need to get better at the behavioral side of interviewing - this should be the juice of getting at whether or not an engineer is good. and if they're really good at lying... CEO material? lol.

yieldcrv 2y ago

wait, can Lisa Khan at the FTC attack this too?

lr4444lr 2y ago
Nah, this will be an EEOC bogeyman.

boshalfoshal 2y ago

The problem you are describing is interview variance and hiring bias, not leetcode. This happens irrespective of interview style. Many companies have question banks that are specially designed to be fair/have some contextual relevance (ideally) to some "realistic" problem. Or at least, many of the companies I've interviewed at follow this model. I consider these coding questions to be "leetcode" style because at the end of the day they are an isolated coding problem, even though they may not be a problem from leetcode verbatim. Companies that execute on that style of interview well are generally fairly pleasant interviews, at least in my experience. Good companies/interviewers will gauge more than just the final code to determine a hire or no hire. And a large portion of companies also have hiring ratings on a scale to make it less binary.

kidintech 2y ago
Question banks that are too big: huge variance, and OP's point stands. Question banks that are too small: leaked on eastern forums immediately, candidates show up reading answers out to you (some of the guides include guidance on when to pretend to think, I am not kidding). The idealized version of "question banks" might work. The real one does not; you'd require employees constantly scouring forums in every language known to mankind, immediately removing anything that gets leaked. On top of that you'd probably require a competent committee overseeing all questions in the bank constantly and ensuring the lack of variance in difficulty. Source: I interviewed at and for Goog and Pltr.
- boshalfoshal 2y ago
  I agree with you, but I don't really see how this invalidates the style of interviews where you're presented with some timeboxed coding problem (of reasonably scaled difficulty) and are asked to solve it. There will be bad actors regardless of the interview style, thats why companies have multiple interview types/styles/rounds to sus out a candidate, as you probably know. If they BSed their way through a leetcode interview, then they probably won't make it past a behavioral interview where they have to go in depth on some past project. And if they BSed that as well as every other round, then hey maybe they are crafty enough to succeed at the actual job.

choppaface 2y ago

Engineers typically optimize for their own learning, and the false negative rate can reflect more about how aggressively the interviewing panel wants specific peers versus how much they actually want the job done well. Suppose there was a SWE union and the union has to create their own reference compensation bands. Would the union again lean towards leetcode or some other standardized test? Or just use years of experience and maybe past projects? When weighing the “effectiveness” of leetcode interviews, it’s important to weigh that thus far SWEs have failed to effectively unionize despite e.g. the past class-action no-poaches clearly showing C-suites should be paying engineers a larger share.

ownagefool 2y ago

I don't think the problem is the format, i.e. a 30-50 minute interview on simple coding with DS&A problems, but the escalation. The reality is, fizz buzz got us 75% of the way there. It turns out when pressed, a lot of people can't write code. Yes, there's false positives, but there's also people brute focing their way through via copy & paste. This doesn't manifest as a person who can't do any task, just as a person that's slow, delivers weird abstractions, and would take a lot of your time to get anything useful from. But those people are also making those arguments, because, as you said, there's hundreds of thousands of dollars in it.

sjaak 2y ago
I've also used FizzBuzz at several companies, and the insane amount of people it filters out continues to boggle my mind.
- XorNot 2y ago
  Do you tell them what the "mod" operator is before giving it? The failure rate of FizzBuzz has always struck me as depending on the idea that you can do a lot of programming and just never need that operator.
  - sensanaty 2y ago
    Yeah I know how to implement FizzBuzz since it's such a meme, but I've basically never used the mod operator in real code. Maybe it comes up in more math-y code I suppose, but for most backend/frontend/SQL code I've never reached for it.
    - stefan_ 2y ago
      More mathy code like checking if a number is even or splitting a total number of seconds into minutes and seconds?
    - vundercind 2y ago
      I’ve used it for coloring alternating lines differently in UI code, and as a lazy way to log only every so many times some loop runs. I only know it well because it was covered near the beginning of one of the first programming books I picked up (on Perl 5) and it stuck with me because it seemed wild to me that they had an operator for that.

robbyiq999 2y ago

I totally agree with A and B and have further suspected they use leetcode as a means to support a H1B candidates employment prospects (for those who do pass)

sethammons 2y ago

There is no grand conspiracy. People try to develop what they feel is a fair interview with good signals. It simply turns out that many people are not good at that and have biases that they may not even be aware of. Tackle on some cargo culting and "best practices" and you have your typical broken process. For those wondering what the alternative is to leetcode: a work sample test. Take a real problem your team solved recently, distill it down to remove internal-specific knowledge, and give candidates 3x the time to solve it compared to what it takes an internal dev to solve. Bonus points for having a rubric guide the scoring.

aqme28 2y ago

I don't buy the analysis on 1). Leetcode interviews restrict the pool of SWEs. You have a lot of SWEs who fail to qualify any more, but the few that do are more coveted and get to command higher wages

yobbo 2y ago

What about a type of blind interview where neither of the two know the problem or solution in advance. After, their solution is blindly reviewed/graded by a third party. - Input from the interviewer reflects communication ability, cultural fit, and so on of the candidate. - Input from the blind grader reflects ability of them as a team. - Low grades count against the interviewer as well. Bingo; now both are stakeholders in success.

eschneider 2y ago
This is very much like the "real world" situation. OTOH, I think this leaves the interviewee even more vulnerable to the unfortunate situation where they correctly solve the problem but the interviewer is convinced that a different, wrong solution is correct. Live long enough and you'll have that happen to you. OTOH, seeing how the interviewer reacts to that situation will tell you a lot about whether you really want to work there.

wruza 2y ago

Naive questions ahead, if hires weren’t made scarce by some absurd filter, why would they pay $200-300k extra? Feels like the whole idea of stellar salaries must be based on something stellar. Afair, before Google(?) made it normal, developers were sort of dirt cheap. Weren’t developers in abundance at all times?

palata 2y ago
The reason they pay $200-300k extra is to attract the best they can. Say you got the same salary working in an ethical company than in a FAANG, would you go for the FAANG? The absurd filter is just some kind of lottery. They could have a different one: at the end of the day, it's only when the person starts working that you can actually see what they are worth. The thing with a filter like this one is that it filters out a whole category of people who may actually be good. And it reinforces itself: you hire people who are good at leetcode, who will themselves possibly be good at hiring people who are good at leetcode. Does a company of leetcoders perform better than a company made of a diversity of good engineers? Not clear.
- wruza 2y ago
  I agree with this. But the root commenter talks about it as something these people are worth, when it’s just that - a lottery. A company that has so much money that they don’t know which barrier to put there to stop the flood. You jump through absurd hoops and join the club. Kinda like being accepted into a cool kids league, but activities are the same.
- CoastalCoder 2y ago
  > Say you got the same salary working in an ethical company than in a FAANG, would you go for the FAANG? Very much a tangent, but what do you mean by a company being "ethical"? I have a few concerns about how that term is often used in these discussions: (1) it's treated as a binary quality, rather than some kind of continuum, and (2) there's rarely a recognition that different persons have different conceptions of what's ethical, let alone a justification for what the writer's preferred definition is uniquely superior.

Tainnor 2y ago

> To the company this is acceptable noise, but to the individual, this is costing us 100s of thousands of dollars, because there’s only a handful of companies that pay well and they all have the same interview process. If you want to earn top money, you gotta play the game. This is true in every profession, you think lawyers that want to work at top law firms have it any easier? There's a lot of valid criticism with respect to today's tech hiring practices (especially because it doesn't only affect top paying companies), but I don't feel like "I can't get ridiculously wealthy without selling my soul" is a particularly compelling one.

7thpower 2y ago
Although I find it disappointing, this is the truth. It is a function of supply and demand. There is always a gating function when you have an abundance of supply; sometimes it is leetcode, sometimes it is school, take home work, resume formatting, a mixture, all of the above, etc. Everything is a proxy because, in most scenarios, there is no way to understand effectiveness of an employee until they have worked for you for a while. Of course there are other ways, but they all carry their own risks. That’s why referrals, imperfect as they are, carry so much sway. In theory they reduce uncertainty and require some expenditure of political capital.

weatherlite 2y ago

> if you get unlucky and some try hard drops an atomic LC hard bomb on you now you have an entire company you can no longer apply to for a year. I don't think this is an issue of bad luck, its quite probably to get difficult interviews especially if you're applying to the popular names.

vundercind 2y ago

The proof of some of this is that these companies could come up with a standardized test maybe with, say, smaller-scale refreshers every few years (this is normal in some professional certs) and save a ton of money if it were really about ensuring a base level of competence using these sorts of questions as the yardstick. But that would dramatically increase worker mobility, for one thing. So they don’t do that. (“No it’s because they don’t want you to be able to test prep” that makes no sense because 99% of the way to prep for these is… exactly like test prep)

mike_tyson 2y ago

part of the problem is saturation in the job market. higher education, even job experience is no longer considered a sufficient barrier to entry. reminds me when the guy who wrote homebrew failed the apple interview. if i recall. ironic because they use brew so much internally.

noodleman 2y ago

This is a good assessment. 1 and 2 are why the system won't change, but I don't think they were intentionally designed with that in mind. I think it's a hang over from academia, bearing in mind how many of the top engineers at FAANG are PhDs. Well, that and how almost nobody who successfully finds employment after "grinding" leetcodes wants to remove the barriers for entry. I think Leetcoders can't envisage a better way to assess someone than by subjecting them to the same kind of hoop-jumping you get made to do in university. They're not interviewing you for a job as there's no module on interviewing candidates on the CS curriculum, and don't have much professional experience outside of academics or software engineering. They're simulating a dissertation defence, because that's how they were assessed for their competence. That's my charitable interpretation. If I'm being cynical, it's elitism - a way of making sure you're "one of us" (read: obnoxiously academic, Type-A personality, "logic over feelings").

KaiserPro 2y ago
> how many of the top engineers at FAANG are PhDs. Not that many, but its interesting how many are from "elite" universities. I'm in a research org for a FAANG and we often get to see all the handwringing about how we can't recruit more of people type x. Well, if you only hire from MIT, Stanford, Oxford etc, then they are all going to look the same. For those outside the research org, its a bit better, but its still the most uneven place I've worked.

jboggan 2y ago

3) It's also a form of hazing to make the engineers conducting the interview feel better about their current station.

simplefish 2y ago

I interviewed at a company known for consistently asking one of the same four questions in a specific interview round. These questions were widely shared on forums like Blind, Leetcode, and Glassdoor. The recruiters also provided strong guidance on the type of problems to expect. I prepared thoroughly for all four main questions and any other plausible ones I could think of. I practiced writing solutions to ensure I was fast enough for the interview. Additionally, I pre-prepared ideal answers for each question in case I got stuck. When the interview came, I got a total curveball: a question that was significantly harder than the usual ones. It didn't fit the round's theme (it was a DSA question, but I'd already aced the DSA round), was obscure enough not to be on LeetCode, and required writing a solver for a hard variant of a known algorithm. I panicked, copied the prompt into ChatGPT (despite being instructed not to use it), transcribed the result, and pretended I had recently studied the relevant algorithm. I passed the round, nailed the other interviews, got the offer, and accepted. Later, I found out that interviewers are instructed to pick one of four specific questions for that round, and the one I got wasn't in the list. I'm left wondering if the interviewer was trying to sink me or was just bored with the usual questions. The whole experience raised several questions for me: Is it cheating if I already had pre-prepared answers for the questions they were supposed to ask? What's the difference between using pre-prepared answers and using Google or ChatGPT during the interview? If the interview had gone according to plan, what was I actually demonstrating? My ability to use Google? When the interviewer asked an impossibly difficult question, I would have failed if I answered it legit, even though I'm a good engineer. Failing such an unfair interview round doesn't serve the company's interests. What is this interview process meant to demonstrate? My true value as an engineer lies in my ability to communicate clearly, think outside the box, identify and address technical tradeoffs, mentor juniors, and propose technical solutions that meet requirements while minimizing risks. Yet, I'm expected to solve a hard variant of the Traveling Salesman Problem in 45 minutes or I don't get the job? Why? The whole process seems broken, but I'm not sure how to fix it.

weatherlite 2y ago
How did you do it without them noticing, you weren't sharing your screen ?
2y ago

mateus1 2y ago

This reads very similarly to consulting case interview questions. 1) It requires a lot of free time beforehand to study the frameworks so it filters intent but also removes those who need to work and 2) it seems objective on the surface but you can essentially pick winners by choosing difficulty and nudging along.

bambax 2y ago

I'm not sure there's so much agency in any of this. Most of it is probably cargo-culting. Every software shop wants to be Google, so they do what Google does (or what they think Google is doing). It doesn't matter if they do it well, or understand (or agree with) the ultimate purpose of the process. If Google engineers all wore pink robes and top hats while interviewing then we'd see that everywhere.

lijok 2y ago

I think you’re overthinking it. Hanlon’s razor applies - the industry as a whole is incompetent at interviewing. And to be clear I’m not being smug here - every time I’ve ran recruitment rounds the interview process was a mess. It’s an extremely difficult equation to balance and as an industry we have never made the commitment to figure out a golden standard for how to do it.

johnnyanmac 2y ago

>because there’s only a handful of companies that pay well If this was just FAANG I wouldn't even mind it. Bigger compensation means bigger hoops to jump through, artificial or otherwise. At least those bigger companies come with interview guides. But I've been dropped Leetcode mediums on some Unity game dev jobs barely paying 40/hr with minimal benefits. Game interviews already have an absurd number of topics to try and guess you'll be quizzed on. (last interview wanted low level C memory/bit manipulation question... the one before that did Unreal Engine trivia... then the one before that decided to give me vector math and ray intersection questions), adding in random string manipulation questions when you will barely use more than concatenation on the job doesn't help with studying.

bena 2y ago
If you are applying for game dev jobs, C memory management, the gnarly parts of Unreal engine, vector math, and ray intersection are all things you could be doing on the job. Game dev is lower paying, less structured, and more involved than typical web dev jobs. I’d really only want to get into game dev early in my career or as an independent creator. It’s a touch exploitative.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  It sure is. I could also be questionied on: - CPU/GPU architecture - graphics/shader programming ( I do enjoy graphics programming, but I have been asked these questions despite not applying for graphics roles) - GPGPU - traditional software engineering (programming patterns, architecture) - netcode (I never applied to a network engineering position. I in fact actively avoid that part of the stack) - general industry questions (what kinds of bugs can appear on shipping build that may not appear on debug builds?) - a myriad of gameplay programming paradigms - coding tests in Unity, despite applying for an unreal engine position (this has in fact happened twice now. I know Unity, but come on: can you imagine getting a javascript test for a c++ position?). I've been asked all of these in some capacity over the years. At what point is it on me for not being some sort of omni net/graphics/engine gamedev that can answer any question on the fly, and not on the company for being paranoid about professionals studying for the skills they are clearly seeking? If someone can "study for your interview", why wouldn't you want that person? That's what they do on the job after all. > I’d really only want to get into game dev early in my career or as an independent creator. I'm already 8 years in, so a bit late for that. My plan is eventually to go indie, but I need a bit more time in my career before making that jump. Despite the common advice c. 2022, getting a boring cushy tech job right now isn't very viable, so may as well stick to what I'm actually getting interviews for.

dukeyukey 2y ago

> “if you know how to problem solve you will always pass.” See, this is true eventually. But it's _definitely_ not true in 45 minutes.

bena 2y ago

We’re hiring for an entry level position where I work. So entry level, that their first month is going to be dedicated to simply learning the framework we use. However, we do require a base level of competency. We give out a 40-ish minute assessment. Two multiple choice and three coding problems. And they’re easy. One of them is essentially “John has a 5 gallon bucket and 3 gallon bucket, how many buckets does he have?”. All you have to do is rewrite the clearly labeled circuit diagram as a Boolean expression. Not a single person this round has passed. Several have failed the simple ones. So while grilling people on the minutiae of a language or asking them to solve the traveling salesman is not beneficial, neither is nothing. We should be testing floors, not ceilings

martindbp 2y ago

It's also a great way to filter out anyone who has any kind of commitment like kids, aging parents to take care of, or have health issues themselves that makes it hard to cram leet code non stop on top of a busy career. For companies this is very rational, you want non-distracted employees who can work over time.

hobs 2y ago
It's really not that rational unless you want someone only familiar with being the top code monkey. In all my years of sw dev the number of times that would have helped vs being able to communicate and manage expectations across a swath of people is like 1:1000.
- slavapestov 2y ago
  To be fair, you need at least one person on the team to do the actual work, while everyone else is “communicating and managing expectations”.
  - bandyaboot 2y ago
    It’s actually possible for members of the team to be capable of doing “actual work” in addition to being good communicators.
  - pavel_lishin 2y ago
    That statement is not untrue, but I think it over-estimates how much of the "actual work" is banging out code, vs. making sure the correct code is being written.
    - ryandrake 2y ago
      Yea, I've worked in a place where it was just "coders coding" and nobody was communicating and managing expectations, and that was its own unique form of awful. You need both.

bdangubic 2y ago

> there’s only a handful of companies that pay well with all due respect I believe this is about as far from the truth as it gets. I believe the issue is that people think they have to work at FAANGs in order to be paid REALLY well which is just nuts. I know many people making (very) high 6 figures working at places most have never heard of. instead of looking for FAANGs people should be looking at companies that have been in business for 20+ years (if publicly-traded company the easiest "measure" would be whether you would invest your own dough into that company) and then make your self indispensable there (this is much easier than it sounds) to a point where you are more valuable to the company they company is to you. This is un-achievable at FAANG but this should be everyone's career goal. once you are worth more to a company then company is to you, compensation-wise sky is the limit :)

ZephyrBlu 2y ago
> I know many people making (very) high 6 figures working at places most have never heard of You know people making ~800-900k at places most people have never heard of? That is what "high 6 figures" means. I have to assume you mean more like ~$180-190k?
- fragmede 2y ago
  Not op, but FWIW, I know people who make high six figures (explicitly, $750k>) at companies that aren't household names or FAANG(ish) companies (or AI companies for that matter), though I also know my share of people that are at such companies that most people, or maybe just people here have heard of, that also make > $750k. Some of them aren't even software engineers! Most (all?) of them aren't paid that much on their W2 though and have lucked out with stock options/RSUs/related compensation (again, at non-FAANG companies, some private). Not trying to brag that I have well-paid friends, though it might come across that way; just corroborating the fact that it's possible for late-career professionals to make that kind of money at non-FAANG companies.
  - ZephyrBlu 2y ago
    I 100% believe it's possible, but that's even more of a lottery than FAANG is which would negate his point :). If you can get your foot in the door it's hard to beat FAANG comp on a risk-adjusted basis and they do actually employ quite a lot of SWEs, which I think is why it's such a focal point for tech jobs even though you can get similar comp in other situations.

valicord 2y ago

> I will ask you verbatim one of those quad tree/number theory/inclusion exclusion principle questions Why don't you list them here to illustrate your point?

tgv 2y ago

> this is costing us 100s of thousands of dollars That depends very much on your world view. If you get the job, it would imply you've just cost a lot of other people $100ks. That simply can't be true, because there's a small number of such jobs. The only way this can possibly hold is if you hold that only the "best" candidate should get the job, and by "best" you mean: the one that gets most of the leetcode questions right. But then there's no us. Edit: I'm not in favor of leetcode interviews, and I do understand that there's a bias in interviews (which won't go away when you drop the leetcode).

JKCalhoun 2y ago

Leetcode feels meritocratic. I suspect many people (engineers perhaps more so) don't trust their ability to "size someone up" from 45 minutes of casual conversation alone. Or worse, they worry that they'll have to defend their hire/donthire based on what amounts to a casual conversation whereby they were trying to judge character, affability, confidence, drive, motivation.... Leetcode is lazy, easy.

azangru 2y ago

> Meet someone who went to your Alma mater? Same gender? Same race? Give them the same question as everyone else, but hint them through it, ignore some syntax errors, and give them a strong hire for “communication” when they didn’t even implement the optimal approach… I do not know how hiring is done at megacorps; but on the few occasions I participated in tech interviews, we were looking for candidates to join the team that I was on. So, what I was interested about the candidates was how well they were prepared for the kind of work our team does; and how much I would like to work with them. I am sure this second question introduces all sorts of subjective biases; but then, hey, aren't you going to spend countless future hours with that person? At least the first concern incentivised us to make sure candidates were sufficiently competent. BTW, we didn't ask leetcode-type questions. > but to the individual, this is costing us 100s of thousands of dollars, because there’s only a handful of companies that pay well and they all have the same interview process I am not sure I am following the argument. If there is only a handful of companies that pay well, and if you only consider companies out of that list for employment, isn't it reasonable to predict that there will be lots of other candidates who want the same, far more than the number of available positions at those companies. How, then, should those companies select from such a pool of candidates?

tzs 2y ago

> A way to suppress wages and job mobility for SWE. Who wants to switch jobs when it means studying for a month or two? If what Google search tells me is true the average SWE tenure is only a couple of years or so. I might need a month or two of study (or more!) to be able to handle the harder Leetcode problems, but if I was expecting to have to do this every couple of years or so I'd consider taking some steps to maintain that knowledge between jobs. That would probably be considerably less overall effort than forgetting it and having to cram for months every couple of years.

FabHK 2y ago

And you think without leetcode questions the despicable biased interviewer from your example would not be able to hire someone from their Alma mater over someone else?

wegfawefgawefg 2y ago

Casual gamedev here. Ive written like 100 quadtrees from scratch so its a goto algorithm Ive got down by memory. I used to think this datastructure was very basic and common because young gamedevs often share it online with eachother. Highschoolers etc. One time in a technical interview I realized a quadtree would solve the problem they were asking. I also happened to be reading SICP and practical common lisp on the plane on the way over to the interview. (specifically the sql sdl macro chapter) Unfortunately this gave me an idea. I narrated, sketched out and pseudocoded a plist based quadtree on the whiteboard and felt pretty good about myself. I turned around to see my interviewers were not impressed. Actually they thought I was an idiot. They didnt know what a quadtree was, and they were quite upset I used "tuples". I assured them its very efficient, and that the compiler would take care of "the tuples". They failed me. Moral of the story don't use common lisp in a javascript interview.

gofreddygo 2y ago

> A way to suppress wages > A way to mask bias > Same gender? Same race? > someone you don’t like Ok fair points. it really could be a thing when you've already decided and are just playing around the process. But ya'know even when there isn't an inherent bias from race, gender, alma maters and overall like ability, the whole tech interview process still sucks. The shit soup presented at a coding interview, leetcode or take home style ones are a result of wholesale cargo cult stupidity than malice. There's no incentive at any level in BigCo. Margins are too big for top level to care. its hard to measure, middle management layer can easily fudge metrics while driving the org effectively into the ground. Lower layer that made it through the filter, sick of this grind and are busy filing tasks sipping free coffee. The elephant in the room is that you cannot make hiring a process driven activity. This is org level dysfunction. There's more such exhibits - DEI, promo criteria, ERGs, re-org politics, vendor selection to name a few.