5 ms·
The LC interviews are like testing people how fast they can run 100m after practice, while the real job is a slow arduous never ending jog with multiple detours
by samiv 1y ago
The LC interviews are like testing people how fast they can run 100m after practice, while the real job is a slow arduous never ending jog with multiple detours and stops along the way.
But yeah that's the game you have to play now if you want the top $$$ at one of the SMEGMA companies.
I wrote (for example) my 2D game engine from scratch (3rd party libs excluded)
https://github.com/ensisoft/detonator https://github.com/ensisoft/detonator
but would not be able to pass a LC type interview that requires multiple LC hard solutions and a couple of backflips on top. But that's fine, I've accepted that.
- MarcelOlsz 1y ago5 years ago you'd have a project like that, talk to someone at a company for like 30m-1hr about it, and then get an offer.
- sailingparrot 1y agoDid you mean to type 25? 5 years ago LC challenge were as, if not more, prevalent than they are today. And a single interview for a job is not something I have seen ever after 15 years in the space (and a bunch of successful OSS projects I can showcase). I actually have the feeling it’s not as hardcore as it used to be on average. E.g. OpenAI doesn’t have a straight up LC interview even though they probably are the most sought after company. Google and MS and others still do it, but it feel like it has less weight in the final feedback than it did before. Most en-vogue startup have also ditched it for real world coding excercices. Probably due to the fact that LC has been thoroughly gamed and is even less a useful signal than it was before. Of course some still do, like Anthropic were you have to have a perfect score to 4 leetcode questions, automatically judged with no human contact, the worst kind of interview.
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoThere's an entire planet of jobs that have nothing to do with leetcode. I was talking about those, not FAANG stuff. Unfortunately I am not FAANG royalty. >Of course some still do, like Anthropic were you have to have a perfect score to 4 leetcode questions, automatically judged with no human contact, the worst kind of interview. Should be illegal honestly.
- almostgotcaught 1y ago> Should be illegal honestly. I can't imagine this kind of entitlement. If you don't want to work for them, don't study leetcode. If you want to work for them (and get paid tons of money), study leetcode. This isn't a difficult aristotelian ethics/morals question.
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoI meant no human-in-the-loop wrt hiring, which is what I thought you were getting at.
- almostgotcaught 1y agoIt's the same exact thing - if some company makes you jump through hoops to get hired that you find distasteful just don't apply to company.
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoYou don't know their interview process unless it's one of the big tech companies though.
- matheusmoreira 1y agoNo. Certain things just harm basic human dignity and should be outlawed. Judgement comes from our peers, not from machines.
- hn_go_brrrrr 1y agoBut sometimes also machines. ACLs are enforced by machines, and everyone is fine with that.
- antonvs 1y agoNot all of us are market extremists. The “invisible hand of the market” doesn’t care about human rights.
- nsxwolf 1y agoI literally got my first real job 26 years ago by talking about my game engine, for a fintech firm.
- saagarjha 1y agoI don’t know if this has changed or perhaps was not representative but my entire loop at Anthropic involved people reviewing my code.
- sailingparrot 1y agoMight depend on the specific position you applied to. Was it a pure SDE role or more on the research side ?
- saagarjha 1y agoBasically pure software engineering
- sailingparrot 1y agoInteresting, maybe they stopped doing this then. It used to be that you received a link for an automated online test, with 4 progressively harder questions, and you needed to score 1000/1000 to go the next step and speak to a human.
- lovich 1y agoI have been getting grilled on leet code style questions since the beginning my of my career over 12 years ago. The faangs jump and then the rest of the industry does some dogshit imitation of their process
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoI'm lucky I'm in the frontend webdev sphere then I guess instead of like being a pure backend guy. I've had a couple of those live ones and just denied them. I did manage to implement a "snake" algorithm once but got denied because I wasn't able to talk about time/space complexity.
- lovich 1y agoAs someone who’s hired 10s of engineers across multiple companies, it’s bullshit on the hiring side too. It was humbling having to explain to fellow adult humans that when your test question is based on an algorithm solving a real business problem that we work on every day, a random person is not going to implement a solution in one hour as well as we can. I’ve seen how the faangs interview process accounts for those types of bias and mental blindness and are actually effective, but their solutions require time and/or money so everywhere I’ve been implements the first 80% that’s cheap and then skips on the rest that makes it work
- MarcelOlsz 1y ago>As someone who’s hired 10s of engineers across multiple companies Any way to reach out? :) I think it boils down to companies not wanting to burn money and time on training, and trying to come up with all sorts of optimized (but ultimately contrived) interview processes. Now both parties are screwed. >It was humbling having to explain to fellow adult humans that when your test question is based on an algorithm solving a real business problem that we work on every day, a random person is not going to implement a solution in one hour as well as we can. Tell me about it! Who were you explaining this to?
- spike021 1y agoNot sure if that's a typo. 5 years ago was also pretty LC-heavy. Ten years ago it was more based on Cracking the Coding Interview. So i'd guess what you're referring to is even older than that.
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoTalking about general jobs not FAANG adjacent.
- spike021 1y agoI rarely apply for or interview at FAANG or adjacent companies...
- SJC_Hacker 1y agoNearly everyone is FAANG adjacent Apart from those companies where social capital counts for more ...
- lll-o-lll 1y ago> 5 years ago you'd have a project like that, talk to someone at a company for like 30m-1hr about it, and then get an offer. Based on my own experiences, that was true 25 years ago. 20 years ago, coding puzzles were now a standard part of interviewing, but it was pretty lightweight. 5 years ago (covid!) everything was leet-code to get to the interview stage.
- eek2121 1y agoI read this, and intentionally did not read the replies below. You are so wrong. You can write a library, even an entirely new language from scratch, and you will still be denied employment for that library/language.
- iyc_ 1y agoMistakenly read this as you wrote that 2D game engine (which looks awesome btw) for a job interview to get the job: "I can't compete with this!!! HOW CAN I COMPETE WITH THESE TYPES OF SUBMISSIONS!?!?! OH GAWD!!!"
- throwaway7783 1y agoAnd nowadays people are blatantly using AI to answer questions like this (https://www.finalroundai.com/coding-copilot https://www.finalroundai.com/coding-copilot). Even trying to stumble through design questions using AI
- roncesvalles 1y ago>The LC interviews are like testing people how fast they can run 100m after practice Ah, but, the road to becoming good at Leetcode/100m sprint is: >a slow arduous never ending jog with multiple detours and stops along the way Hence Leetcode is a reasonably good test for the job. If it didn't actually work, it would've been discarded by companies long ago. Barring a few core library teams, companies don't really care if you're any good at algorithms. They care if you can learn something well enough to become world-class competitive. If you can show that you can become excellent at one thing, there's a good chance you can become excellent at another thing. That's basically also the reason that many Law and Med programs don't care what your major in undergrad was, just that you had a very high GPA in whatever you studied. A decent number of Music majors become MDs, for example.
- grugagag 1y agoBut why stop there? Why not test candidates with problems they have never seen before? Or problems similar to the problems of the organization hiring? Leetcode mostly relies on memorizing patterns with a shallow understanding but shows the candidates have a gaming ability. Does that imply quality in any way? Some people argue that willing to study for leetcode shows some virtue. I very much disagree with that.
- didibus 1y ago> Leetcode mostly relies on memorizing patterns Math is like that as well though. It's about learning all the prior axioms, laws, knowing allowed simplifications, and so on.
- aeonik 1y agoIn the same way that writing and performing a new song is "just memorizing prior patterns and law" or that writing a new book is the same. I.e. it's not about that. Like sure it helps to have a base set of shared language, knowledge, and symbols, but math is so much more than just that.
- 1y ago
- deadghost 1y ago>how fast they can run 100m after practice, while the real job is a slow arduous never ending jog with multiple detours and stops along the way I've always explained it as demonstrating your ping pong skills to get on the basketball team.
- Figs 1y ago> SMEGMA companies Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, I'm guessing... but, what are the other two?
- jiggawatts 1y agoI prefer AGAMEMNON: Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Ebay, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Netflix
- saghm 1y ago"Startups" and "Enterprise"? I guess that basically covers everything
- esseph 1y agoLol :)
- RagnarD 1y ago"SMEGMA companies." :D
- anonzzzies 1y agoYes. If work was leetcode problem solving, I would actually enjoy it. Updating npm packages and writing tiny features that get canned a week later is all not that stimulating.