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A lot of developers that aren't purely obsessed with frontend or AI-like niches find Leetcoding rote. Ultimately it's just about facing a question you are unfam

A lot of developers that aren't purely obsessed with frontend or AI-like niches find Leetcoding rote. Ultimately it's just about facing a question you are unfamiliar with and whiteboarding it with a potential employer - it's only humiliating if you've got an ego to swallow.

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everdrive 2y ago
I think that might be a bit narrow. It's humiliating not because you need to bear your ignorance in front of a judgemental audience. (although that part certainly is not comfortable) It's humiliating because the leetcode is not actually representative of anything you'll need to know to do the job. It's an exercise which selections for who can jump through the most hoops, and doesn't really select for the actual job skills.
- sfn42 2y ago
  That depends entirely on the problem they ask you to solve. All the technical interviews I've done have been completely reasonable basic programming tasks. Yet I always get really good feedback, did one a few weeks ago where the interviewer said it was the best technical interview he'd had in years. I felt like it could have gone better, and like I could have done just as well years ago when I was fresh out of university. So that tells me that a lot of devs really suck at basic programming, I assume they're the ones joking that their job is just copying code from SO. And probably also the ones who complain about having to show that they can write code before being hired to write code. Personally I think it's great. Easy way to show that I know my shit and separate myself from all my peers who somehow graduated with the same degree as me despite not being able to write a correct fizzbuzz after 3 years. I'll take a live coding interview any time. I know I'm good at this, don't mind proving it.
  - everdrive 2y ago
    I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I think we probably disagree when it comes to leetcode. One thing I'll note is that in my experience, companies implicitly do not _want_ you to work at too high of a level; they fill up your hours until there is no free time, prevent you from returning to older tasks or projects to improve them, and more or less require "good enough" solutions at best. This isn't necessarily meant as a complaint, but this is yet another way in which leet code may not really fit the job that's being performed; the company is attempting to get as much work done as possible and for whatever reason is not very incentivized to ensure that the work is done to a high standard. In other words, the super complex leet code sorts of techniques will just never in practice be utilized. Now to your point, whether or not you find yourself in this situation is going to depend on your job and your company.
    - sfn42 2y ago
      I've never really done much leetcode. Might have done a problem here and there for fun but probably less than 10 total. I'm not sure whether people literally mean leetcode when they say leetcode, but I should probably clarify that I'm not specifically talking about problems from the leetcode website. I did once get a sort of quiz from codingame to complete at home(took like 15 minutes or so), but other than that I think my interviewers have made up their own problems. One was a class responsible for storing car data, being able to get them by plate number and stuff like that. Recently I did one where I basically implemented a tax calculator, calculating bracket tax and stuff like that. The general format has been a class with method stubs, and a corresponding test class. The assignment is basically make the tests pass. I think that's a good format. Allows you to write some real logic, sort of similar to what we do in daily work. The tax calculator was a bit math-heavy but still required some logic and some creative use of data structures to store tax brackets without hardcoding everything etc.

deleted 2y ago

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everdrive 2y ago

I think that might be a bit narrow. It's humiliating not because you need to bear your ignorance in front of a judgemental audience. (although that part certainly is not comfortable) It's humiliating because the leetcode is not actually representative of anything you'll need to know to do the job. It's an exercise which selections for who can jump through the most hoops, and doesn't really select for the actual job skills.

sfn42 2y ago
That depends entirely on the problem they ask you to solve. All the technical interviews I've done have been completely reasonable basic programming tasks. Yet I always get really good feedback, did one a few weeks ago where the interviewer said it was the best technical interview he'd had in years. I felt like it could have gone better, and like I could have done just as well years ago when I was fresh out of university. So that tells me that a lot of devs really suck at basic programming, I assume they're the ones joking that their job is just copying code from SO. And probably also the ones who complain about having to show that they can write code before being hired to write code. Personally I think it's great. Easy way to show that I know my shit and separate myself from all my peers who somehow graduated with the same degree as me despite not being able to write a correct fizzbuzz after 3 years. I'll take a live coding interview any time. I know I'm good at this, don't mind proving it.
- everdrive 2y ago
  I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I think we probably disagree when it comes to leetcode. One thing I'll note is that in my experience, companies implicitly do not _want_ you to work at too high of a level; they fill up your hours until there is no free time, prevent you from returning to older tasks or projects to improve them, and more or less require "good enough" solutions at best. This isn't necessarily meant as a complaint, but this is yet another way in which leet code may not really fit the job that's being performed; the company is attempting to get as much work done as possible and for whatever reason is not very incentivized to ensure that the work is done to a high standard. In other words, the super complex leet code sorts of techniques will just never in practice be utilized. Now to your point, whether or not you find yourself in this situation is going to depend on your job and your company.
  - sfn42 2y ago
    I've never really done much leetcode. Might have done a problem here and there for fun but probably less than 10 total. I'm not sure whether people literally mean leetcode when they say leetcode, but I should probably clarify that I'm not specifically talking about problems from the leetcode website. I did once get a sort of quiz from codingame to complete at home(took like 15 minutes or so), but other than that I think my interviewers have made up their own problems. One was a class responsible for storing car data, being able to get them by plate number and stuff like that. Recently I did one where I basically implemented a tax calculator, calculating bracket tax and stuff like that. The general format has been a class with method stubs, and a corresponding test class. The assignment is basically make the tests pass. I think that's a good format. Allows you to write some real logic, sort of similar to what we do in daily work. The tax calculator was a bit math-heavy but still required some logic and some creative use of data structures to store tax brackets without hardcoding everything etc.