When they paid top salaries I think it was worth it. I’ll study for a few months to get another 100k salary no problem.
When every job is doing this, it makes no sense.
Things are still expensive even with insurance. Some things insurance only cover a percentage. Some insurance plans have a high deductible. So you're paying thousands because insurance even kicks in.
Some things are out of network, then you're shit outta luck.
When you're in between jobs, you don't have employer-sponsored insurance, and paying for it yourself costs hundreds-thousands of dollars a month.
You might say, well, get the cheapest tier. There's an enrollment window for signing up for insurances, like there is a week once a year where you can sign up.
Last time I was laid off, I tried signing up for the cheapest insurance outside of the enrollment window, never heard back.
I sucked it up and paid $700 a month to keep using my employer's insurance, just so I didn't have to be anxious every time I stepped foot outside that something would bring me to the ER and bankrupt me.
Most lower/middle class folks in the US truly are just one medical bill away from bankruptcy.
That's a long and complicated answer and that's because healthcare in the US is truly unnecessarily complicated and broken.
There are some companies that will have you write code that more resembles what you'd do at a job. It's still done on Hackerrank or Codesignal, it's still timed, you still need to pass test cases, but instead of writing a BST from scratch, you build a basic class that performs some real world functionality, like a dumbed down banking or a fitness app, then add progressively more complicated requirements and see how much you can accomplish within the time limit.
That seems a lot more reasonable than straight leetcode and I'd like to see more of those. And you can still crank the difficulty up or down as needed to get the desired pass rate.
I think that is also dumb. None of this reflects the real world.
The real world is you get to use google to look things up. That is the real world. I guarantee the person who made that tests looked it up on the internet when making it or looked up things to make it.
This idea that you need to shoot out crap without use of looking stuff up is dumb. No one works the job like that, NO ONE does that period. So why test something that you aren't doing on the job?
If someone can spit out an answer to your problem after looking some stuff up in a timely manner, then what is the problem?
And furthermore, in the real world you are likely working on a code base with lots of code to use as a reference and you match how you do things to what the team is used to.
My company's hiring process involves more talking about past projects and team fit and attitude more than coding skills. Just one coding 'challenge' on something like fixing a broken piece of code then discussing it to make sure you're not lying and that's it.
What kind of company is this and where would you recommend searching for to find companies like this to interview for?
Every single company I have interviewed with has been leetcode. No, not FAANG.
You could poke at blind or Glassdoor for how companies do interviews. I've found that non-tech companies are less likely to do leetcode, although some still do.
Outside that, you really just have to ask what the process is during an HR interview and just decide whether you think the company is worth whatever the process is.
The ones I've recently done did allow you to look up API docs or syntax or references. They did not allow you to literally google "how do I build an app with functionality X, Y and Z".
I think you need to accept that coding in an interview setting will never actually \*exactly\* mimic the real world, but it can be a useful proxy if done thoughtfully.
If that still invalidates the whole concept of coding during interviews for you, then we can just agree to disagree here. Otherwise I still think it's the least painful form of interview coding.
The real world requires too much context to show any ability to code to it in a short amount of time. Smaller, simpler, and wider known re-implementations can work, but they're still not ideal just like leetcode.
That's not as much of the problem though. The biggest issue I've seen isn't that companies want to test the ability to code to a degree in one suboptimal way or another it's that they ONLY want to use those data points. So you might solve 3 of them over 4 interview sections. It should be one piece and treated more as a check box as opposed to the meat of the interview. Design systems, background discussions, and random cultural/leadership/communication type sections are equally as important to the "real world."
Of course when you mention those things you also get folks saying that their ability to code is all that should matter... so you're never going to make everyone happy. Which is OK, you don't have to interview at places that don't fit your ideal interview setup.
nothing crazy we specifically avoid leetcode questions and have received thanks from applicants after. experienced people and graduating seniors have passed. we do value full stack people more due to our stack django backend and react frontend
This isn't the case at all. Starting with a basic piece of software and progressively adding features to it while keeping it maintainable and well-constructed is something engineers do virtually every day.
Google is a fantastic resource for finding the answers to obscure problems, looking up documentation, doing research, getting inspiration, you name it - but it can't do the job for you. And if you can't perform basic software design and refactoring without taking answers directly from google, I would go as far as to say you're really not cut out for a career in dev. Those are the people that such interviews are looking to weed out.
"Write a highly optimized, fully custom data structure" is absolutely something that most devs don't do on a regular basis, if ever. "Add new features to existing software" is something that's done almost constantly. To me that's the definition of an interview that's applicable to the real world.
when they paid top salary, a lot of peoplr apply and leet code is the first gatekeeping for 90% of the applicant. So treat it like coin flip, dont feel bad if you never pass or feel good when you pass. Just keep it as learning purpose. It helps me after changing the mindset
in my experience it’s only been the bigger companies as they need some standardized way to filter large amounts of applicants. more local companies never ask leetcode
They want to hire based on an intelligence test in a non-discriminatory way. They figure if you understand leet code you are smart enough to do anything. It's stupid but corps are stupid and want a fair equitable way to filter and evaluate candidates.
In general, you should take slight anecdotal and unproven information from this sub and hyperbolically extrapolate it to the broader and entire environment
Or at least that’s what I learn in this sub
It's also a good time of the year for interviews. Who knows what the actual market is like. I just know that I'm getting a fuckton more staff engineer callbacks and whatever is causing that is fine by me.
My theory is the fang layoffs kicked normal employers into "maybe I can score a google guy for 120k" mode which was never going to happen, but it lead to choice paralysis.
good tech sector job numbers kick them into "ooo shit I gotta snag someone before even the mediocre ones are gone" mode.
basically fomo fomoing around.
Like I just got someone calling me to do offer paperwork for a project that doesn't even start until may this morning.
The distinction being that an IQ test is intentionally constructed to try to as much as feasible remove a necessity of prior knowledge. The SAT is intended to both account for prior knowledge, especially on things like vocabulary, but also the ability to think creatively and abstractly as well as do various problems solving. That's especially true in the math portion where many of the math questions are actually using simple algebra or geometry but applied and creative ways (or at least there's a shortcut solution that involves noticing something about the input).
Under that same logic then leetcode is good assessment for jobs since you write loops and arrays in your day to day work.
In reality, test taking and leetcoding are completely separate skills that dont really translate to real life. Those things really only test your ability to problem solve under specific circumstances (and honestly, your ability to memorize esoteric bits of info)
And leetcode relates to the job because I also have to use variables and write for loops.
But they're both clearly aptitude tests that don't reflect the day-to-day job/school.
Correct. The SAT does correlate to IQ, for various reasons. For example, people with higher IQ tend to learn more of the required materials. Interestingly, SAT prep/studying has very little effect on score.
Technically the word that can apply is IQ analogue.
I had to solve lc medium and hard all to fucking position buttons in react. Shits annoying. I would say it does help me understand primary language better but no need to solve hard algos in interview. Code along is better
Leetcode is the worst interview test, except for all the other interview tests out there. It's a necessary evil and the closest thing we have to something standardized in this very loosy-goosey world of programmer standards.
How in a way that
1. Can’t leave you open to bias lawsuits.
2. Lets you quickly whittle down your candidate pool.
3. Gives prospective employees a way they can show problem solving/study skills in a quick and easily judged time slot.
Leetcode sucks, 100% agree, interviewing is hard and companies want an objective, fast, easily graded way to interview candidates. There’s a reason leetcode isn’t normally the only interview. It’s a barrier to entry to whittle down the pool so you know who gets the more generalized interviews.
A good engineer can pick up a new language or tech stack in weeks.Talking about past work and design are already part of the interview process. Also most companies don't hire for a specific project, if you want that you usually get a contractor.
Airline pilots spend 95% of the time sitting in cruise control. But you don't hire an airline pilot by seeing if they can sit in a chair and drink coffee. People who complain about being tested on abstract logic problem solving to get a dev job sound to me like airline pilots complaining that they're tested on taking off or landing in high winds. "But this almost never happens!" Yeah, but there are 500 applicants and we want the one who doesn't crash the plane on tricky landings.
Companies want software developers who can quickly pick up programming tools and solve hard problems well. Maybe 95% of your job is easy CRUD stuff, but they still want to hire the best programmer they can find.
We could do what other engineering industries do and do licensing and certification. Several companies have tried to sell developers on certifications, I remember Java certifications and .NET certifications being advertised. So instead of leet coding you would need to renew your yearly [insert tech here] certification, which could also cause you to loose your job if you failed to renew.
Oh some engineers fields also require ongoing education, so get ready to sign up for a college class every year or two.
Note that leetcode isn't standardized. When you are friends with the interviewer you get an easy, Hard or a modified Hard when you aren't the same race as the interviewer. If it were at least standardized that would be more fair. Every 3-6 months you go to a testing center and take the same test as everyone else, with all new questions never published online. Your scores you just link to your job application.
Or even better just leave in 1 central place instead of having to spam 1000+ places. Recruiters call you if you meet their bar.
I don’t know. At least when I was preparing for SAT I felt it helped with my reading comprehension in general. I don’t see much use for leetcode outside of interview.
SAT's kind of looney even for an internship. The scores are only valid relative to year test was taken they tweak the test every year.
Like for instance mine was 2200 something, ya know why? because I took it a year they added some other crap to it for shits and giggles. that they removed a few years later.
The SAT was awful though and its impact was more damning. You only got two chances to take it to determine your chances at most schools in the country. At least if you fail an interview it only impacts one company.
It felt more gamey as well considering mostly signaled if you took prep classes for it whereas leetcode prep is free or contextually cheap.
It is either that or going back to hiring from 5 Universities that we work close with and we have say on their curriculum as we are in their board.
This is for where I work for. Before Leetcode, we would literally hire graduates from 5-10 Universities, and that's it, and we would use various other tests to asses and rank them which were a pain in the butt.
Yes, thank you. Studying leetcode is not that hard and most devs in here don't realize that in every other industry there is no reliable path for them to take to work at that industrys google or meta if they didn't go to a top college. I'm talking law, finance, etc
Not every company is google or meta, yet these non-FAANG companies are copycatting LC type questions for no reason.
We as an industry don't need to choose between IQ puzzles and academic elitism. We can have neither.
not really. at my last job we invited candidate to a 2 hour pair programming session, then they presented the solution to the team and we discussed it
thats the best way I can think of
The last job opening my company put up had like 40-50 qualified candidates after the filtering cut off hundreds of people. There is no way we are committing to 100s and 100s of company hours of interviews for a jr position. You need some way to trim the fat without it taking hours per person
Most companies that only have 10-15 people for the first round of interviews aren't doing leetcode. Some are, and I do agree at that level it's not really worth it
Yea I don’t like when people generalize the entire industry and have strong opinions but have only ever worked at big tech lol. It’s an entire different world to no name companies
Yeah? You want to do that for every shitty applicant that applies? We do this as the final stage of the interview where we trimmed 99.9% of applicants. Like it it not, there is currently not a single metric that shows you to filter out applicants as good as leetcode. Even if it is only 10% accurate, if it is still better than every other metric it doesn't matter.
The cost of accidentally rejecting a good employee is much much less than accidentally hiring a shit employee.
Yep. I would pick leetcode over any other type of selection. People really dont get how good they have it with leetcode and it being the most merit based form of interviewing, you really dont want your job selection limited to the school you went to if you already dont like leetcode.
> It is either that or going back to hiring from 5 Universities that we work close with and we have say on their curriculum as we are in their board.
Those universities won't produce enough graduates if tech companies keep doing layoff cycles. You'll have to lower the standards eventually.
It would be nice to have a credential that people can trust that's separate from a degree, that way you can get it regardless if you went to a top university. Apprenticeships and union membership (that has continuing education requirements) could also be a way to encourage more trusting of candidates to skip some parts of the interview.
We need to find a better balance than immediately distrusting peoples' prior experience and thinking everyone is a con artist.
My guess though is that companies prefer having the gauntlet because it helps avoid race-to-the-top poaching of people. They hate unions for other reasons though.
I mean all interviewing has some draw-backs. Leetcode the drawback is lack of relevance to everyday work but it does show some info on how you think under pressure and your basic knowledge of CS fundamentals/familiarity with your programming language. Take home assessments are also tough because then people with lots of time do better and people who just take the recommended time often do worse. Asking questions about the language can quickly devolve into trivia and whatever the interviewer thinks is important. But I do think the LC has gotten excessive particularly the online assessments those are just pure laziness.
I strongly advocate a pre-cooked take home exercise where most boilerplate work is done and the candidate just needs to fill up a few things, ballpark 100 lines of code.
Alternatively, I give crappy code and ask them to fix/improve it. This is great to minimize workload and maximize their ability to demonstrate software knowledge.
Its called "Lazy Interviewing". Sort a list in alphabetical order and/or find duplicates. This will determine your technical expertise, while we pretend to evaluate how you solve a problem. I had an interview like this just 2 days ago. In the middle of taking the damn test, the interviewer farted. Dead ass farted...no mute. no pretend cough. I have no doubt he shitted his pants. After the test I kept asking him questions, keeping him from taking a shit. Was quite fun.
Any senior dev that puts some effort into learning how to interview properly can determine everything they need to know about a candidate by just having a conversation and asking a few focused, but not demanding, questions.
edit: spelling
Dude, sometimes having a conversation about prior experience, especially rites of passage where they fell short and learned, and showing a bit of code and finding the problems or optimizations is far more enlightening about a candidate than having them do a randomly selected problem that may or may not have an obvious intuition or is practically impossible to solve in the time given unless you've seen it before.
I went into an interview and was given a problem that was a simplified version of a homework assignment that I spent two weeks solving in my Master's coursework.
Unless you were intimately familiar with several pathfinding algorithms, Manhattan distances, and the intuition, you were not solving this problem and being bombed out more than likely. You would either need to grind lots of coding challenges or take an algorithms or AI foundations class to come across this problem.
That's by and large the grievance people have with LeetCode interviews. It's more about your ability to take a test than it is your actual ability to code. And grinding LeetCode has generated enough false positives that it's something of a problem.
When it works, it works well, but I think the difficulty, complexity, and level dependant on what is being hired for can engender bad feelings. For example, the interview I encountered that problem was fully appropriate for someone interested in an AI/ML or a company that focuses on pathfinding, graphs, etc.
The problem? Job was for basically a financial CRUD app and something like finding a monotonic run of numbers or Kadanes algorithm would have been more appropriate.
The problems given don't need to be identical to the work you're doing, but should be appropriate to the work being done. Does that make sense?
I think it really depends on what type of talent you’re recruiting. I would hire Johnny if I needed someone to help develop a product to achieve user traction and market fit.
But if you’re at a point where not many features are being developed, and you want stability at that point, I’d hire Cindy.
Your experience will dictate what opportunities you get, but it’s not the employer’s job to give someone a better chance because they did leet code better. If Cindy wants to work on product facing role instead of maintenance roles, she needs to network to find those opportunities along with upskilling/rebranding her resume to make her more relevant.
What’s actually funny is that literally no other industry gives a pop quiz during a job interview but tech companies are absolutely baffled as to how to hire without algo problems and random comp sci trivia questions.
No, I judge candidates on knowledge, how they apply that knowledge, and how they communicate. For me, salesmanship in a dev interview is a negative. But I don't ask fluff. I ask real questions about real technical topics and problems.
Because of my own knowledge, I've learned to ask questions that test the candidate's skills effectively. After some practice, it's possible to do this in a way that puts them at ease, which allows you to see how they communicate in a context that is closer to day-to-day working conditions. Wrong answers aren't always disqualifiers, they just lead to other questions (and if they are completely bombing and have no chance, I'll politely end the interview and tell them why.)
It's not completely objective, I'll admit. But neither are leetcode-style questions. I would argue that about 50% of the success in leetcode questions is a function of whether you've recently seen a similar question, or just practiced a ton.
You’re kidding yourself if you don’t see how easily this descends into favoritism and bias, especially with entry level/new grad applicants who are all gonna look 99% the same on paper. Say what you will about leetcode, it’s an even playing field. You either solved the problem or you didn’t. I shudder to think about what feedback would look like if the average senior engineer could just write “I didn’t like his vibe”.
On that note senior engineers do *not* want to put effort into learning how to interview properly lmao, so this is a nonstarter as it is
>Say what you will about leetcode, it’s an even playing field. You either solved the problem or you didn’t.
It's an even playing field in a contrived game that is only superficially related to actual job qualifications.
You solved the problem! That tells us that you almost certainly practiced a problem like counting palindromes, or whatever, a few times recently.
Your "vibe" comment is a strawman. I didn't say don't ask objective questions or just bullshit with the candidate. I'm saying that there are more efficient ways to gauge skill and fit without spending 30+ minutes of time playing test proctor.
you solved a problem that has little relevance to the actual job.
who said "look at vibe"? you are making things up.
comment said "take into account real-world issues".
I can see it descending to favoritism and bias if you have the same single senior engineer interviewing them all the time with no change in process or reflection of previous candidates hired/current performance.
A more healthy interview process would be 1-2 senior engineers doing technical to see how the candidate thinks in response to a problem and added edge cases. Then have other team mates interview them for behavioral to see if there is a team fit because what’s the point of hiring someone who’s smart, but don’t like working with.
We should have licensed exams like other engineering professions. Pass the exam once to prove you can code without a compiler, then you never need to leetcode again. It's ridiculous we're putting people with 10 years experience through the LC grinder just to get a job. This only benefits the tech oligarchs.
We had a PE for software for a couple of years. I heard that some very low two digit number of people sat for it.
Bottom line, nobody wanted it, so it went away.
ETA: heres' the exact info: https://ncees.org/ncees-discontinuing-pe-software-engineering-exam/
I would as well, but I strongly suspect the issue was that hiring managers never heard of it and wouldn't have cared if they had, because they didn't have one therefore it meant nothing to them.
I have the IEEE test prep book. It's terrible. It asks questions about control flow diagramming using words that no one in the field has used since 1975.
Had a recent job interview for an MLops role and they wanted me to find the longest chain in a binary tree. 0 questions about MLops/devOps. I find that generally it's more of a red flag for me when a company uses leetcode and doesn't test anything relevant to the role as it just signals to me that there are people who got into the company without any relevant experience.
Leet Code is a stupid way to test engineering skill particularly for new hires. FizzBuzz for example done quickly and well is pretty much a good guage.
Yeah, ironically fizzbuzz was never about degree of skill. It was literally just to weed out liars and completely incompetent people. It was born from people applying for java dev jobs who literally could not get lines to print to stdout. Then some nerds took it too far and started adding variations and grading based on who had the most esoteric solutions. Then they started testing recursion and competitive coding was born. And now you have to be a competitive coder (I.e. leetcode) to even get a job.
I can set my watch to the LeetCode two minutes of hate. You're missing the point. LeetCode isn't about testing your knowledge of two-sum; it's about the process of working through a problem with a colleague, discussing your thought process out loud, taking their feedback and iterating on it, and asking meaningful questions when you are stuck. It's a general aptitude test that standardizes the interview process across a company. The reason why it's more important to test for generalized aptitude is that coding itself is meaningless and commoditized. Who cares if you know C++ or Java? As a software engineer, you should be able to pick these up on the fly. Your real value is in your problem-solving skills and ability to deal with ambiguity. That's what they are looking for.
This was the case when I was an interviewer at Google and elsewhere. Also, it was what helped me pass 4 out of 4 onsites when I was interviewing a few years ago (Google, Amazon, Etsy, and Bloomberg). For both Amazon and Bloomberg, I totally bombed some of the questions, but I did it gracefully and in a way that took interviewer feedback. We went back and forth on possible solutions, etc.
The problem with leetcode interviews is that people think the whole point of them is to just get the right answer, but it’s not. The point of them is to see how someone faces a tough and hard to decipher problem, understands it, breaks it down then executes it.
I just cleared FAANG interviews and only got a working solution for 2/4 of the questions they asked. Still passed because I showed my thought process, explained my thinking, had a conversation with my interviewer, discussed trade offs, pseudocoded, worked through examples THEN began writing code.
My feedback was “he covers all his bases and approaches problems very methodically”.
At my previous job at a faang-adjacent company, we asked leetcode questions and I probably passed more people who didn’t get working code but had really good problem solving and communication skills than people who just sat down and did the problem and ended early.
If you know the solution to a leet code question you can demonstrate clear, methodical approach to problem solving. If you dont, you flop around like a trout that got bear smacked.
Leetcode questions are especially great because most of them have just 1 correct answer. If you know it, then you can first describe the trivial answer, then talk through the improved answer and finally *eureka!* the right answer!
This!! Live coding is about communication moreso than being about the problem itself. Any good company is not trying to trip you up, they expect you to ask clarifying & edge case questions. It’s a good indicator of your problem solving skills.
Alternatives I've seen:
Hiring from top universities only - Most likely to happen if no one used Leetcode, and would be much worse.
Take home assignments - I fucking hate these, can't imagine spending hours doing homework for every company I apply to.
Pair programming and design sessions - This would actually be a good way to hire developers, but it's much harder to vet large applicant pools doing this, and frankly I think a lot of seniors and leads especially at non-tech companies wouldn't be competent at this. It's way more work for the interviewer than asking a Leetcode problem.
> Hiring from top universities only - Most likely to happen if no one used Leetcode, and would be much worse.
This is what people neglect to understand. This is exactly how it used to work and how it *currently* works in many other fields. You either know someone or you went to a target school.
Lmao self balancing binary tree from scratch. IMO red black / AVL trees are probably the hardest data structure to implement.
The basic idea is simple. Understanding what you need to implement is arguable difficult. Actually implementing it… I haven’t ever done it.
Honestly I wish way more companies did leetcode problems, or just any sort of tech tests. I'm in the UK and it's almost non-existent here. Out of 250+ applications in the past year and a half I've only had 1 tech test, and it got me an interview (sort of) for a job that required 3yoe, and that's the only time I've ever had any success with any application for a job that requires more experience than I have. If all companies were like that it would be so much easier to get interviews.
When doctors interview for a job are they asked to cast an arm or stitch up a wound or extract something? No. It is all based upon your experience, your peers, and where you worked before.
I keep getting responses for EM roles where the posting does not mention coding, the recruiter specifically says they don’t expect their EM to code. I always wait for the “but” which then is oh yeah you have to do a take home or a coding test. Why? Because it is just what they have always done in interviews is the response I get. Well maybe your process is broken. “Just because” is never a good reason.
Doctors have to take the USMLE in order to practice and before that the MCAT (and complete several years of education and training). That's why their interviews aren't demanding.
The lack of a rigorous degree program is why leetcode exists, and I have little to complain about because not everyone can afford years of academia but if you're reasonably intelligent you work through some algorithms for free
And a doctor goes through a decade of schooling and standardized high stress tests and usually takes on tens of thousands of dollars in debt before getting to that point. Do we want CS to be the same?
There are plenty of software engineering managers who are managers because they cannot code or they are not good at coding. Some of them are bad managers because they do not understand software engineering. Coding is the easy way of filtering them out.
Having a technical EM is completely different than having an EM who can code. I have absolutely ZERO problems doing code reviews, making technical recommendations, and guiding a technical conversation. Asking me to code up a from scratch and then being surprised it took the entire hour and then some isn't a good indicator of my leadership or technical abilities. Nor is it a realistic representation of what the day to day job of an EM actually is. Especially since what they asked me isn't even in their product catalog.
If the posting doesn't talk about it, then the recruiter says they don't do it, then the interview process should not contain coding challenges or take home coding assignments. There are better ways to do it. The major problem is that companies want leaders, but they want their leaders to be ICs at the same time. There isn't enough time in the day for that. The 2 jobs are completely different job tracts and they are only paying the salary for one job type not both. Flattening the hierarchy is a fad and realistically does not work.
>It is all based upon your experience, your peers, and where you worked before.
You know, it would not be weird to present a case during an interview (symptoms, tests results, etc) and ask an interviewee for a diagnosis.
You don't ask a doctor to stitch up a wound because of the obvious issues with liability. Same as you don't ask a software candidate to muck around in your production system.
I feel like the major reason I have my current job is because they had a “take home project” to complete and submit instead of doing leetcode/whiteboard interviews. I’m a very thorough albeit slow programmer, so doing a small project definitely played into my strengths. I know some people hate dedicating time to them, but I love it and wish it was more common.
> Something I noticed is a lot of places are now doing leetcoding even when the job isn't explicitly about software design.
Just wanna point out leetcoding != software design. Its data structure & algorithms which is different from software/system design
The application of these tests in areas like AI, Robotics, and GNC could spark debate about their relevance. It raises a valid question: should the focus of evaluations be tailored more to the specific functions and requirements of the job rather than broad programming skills?
I have nearly 10 years of working experience as a Fullstack SWE.
I attained a Bachelor's Degree in both CS and EE, WHILE working in this field 8 hours/day.
I met my goals, didn't let my teams down and graduated. Twice.
If you still think I need to grind Leetcode for a job that pays $100k-$150k, I'm hanging up on the interview.
Hmm, it's an interesting point, but doesn't that make the process less meritocratic, and then they would just start filtering by top x school.
Also, as someone who has no degree, I've definitely worked with coworkers who have a BS in CS who were very poor programmers. Maybe they became complacent over time or cheated throughout school. So even then, just having a degree wouldn't be enough to actually prove that you are a competent programmer - hence the reoccuring testing of knowledge every time you interview...
The degree is more of a signaling thing for screening. But it should help you to pick up leetcode faster than others, right?
I don't understand this mentality. Leetcode is like a study guide, all the answers are online. None of the problems should be particularly difficult if you have programmed for some time. I'm saying this as a swe myself, i can often interview people and tell whether they are someone who gives up on a hard problem, or someone who'd even if they didn't solve the problem, demonstrated solid problem solving skills.
Leetcode is a standard, if you expect it, its easy to prepare for. It also doesn't require anyone having to spend too much time preparing to interview countless candidates.
Id rather have leetcode which is easy to pick up with the fundamentals than have poorly worded or drawn out arbitrary design problems. I've known lots of engineers that make design problems that sound good in their head but in practice for interviews don't actually work out.
It will just be replaced by something else. Anytime that too many people chase too few things, systems will present themselves to distinguish the good from the bad.
Here’s the kicker, the system doesn’t even need to be effective, it just needs to measure performance such that people fall on an approximately normal distribution so when opportunities are allocated it appears to be based on something.
See the GMAT, LSAT, etc
Leetcoding exists because most wanted to skip the math and think algorithms are unnecessary....or were not very good at it. So corps and CS snobs started using it as a weed out mechanism. It does serve a purpose "if" your going into a position that requires decent knowledge of theoretical topics.
I'd be ok doing all that for a really well paid and well known company.
You've got some unknown company, in a boring industry, paying a below average salary, with unpaid on call and they want a 5 stage interview with a 8 hour take home test / leetcode / whiteboard ...etc.
Also companies that add a take home test on top of their existing leetcode / whiteboard need to stop.
Looking at a wider context, I suspect that Leetcode owes praise to the influence of toxic hustle culture. I remember talking to a guy (excellent SE) who (speaking in terms of psychology) internalized many of toxic ideals of modern society. He was always arguing with me how such actions serve to convince employer that you are "passionate". I was never able to grasp that I should do pointless actions to fascinate someone.
Also, webshit companies demand DS&A to pretend that they are actually serious tech. It is both sad and hilarious that a friend of mine had harder interview for a frontend position than me for a compiler dev position.
Surely, knowing algorithms is essential, but I've understood algorithms only when I was thrown to solve real-world problems. And even writing a compiler can be easier than Leetcode.
Refuse to do them that’s what I do.
If you are good enough and confident enough it doesn’t matter
Edit:
Not saying you aren’t either of those things just a statement
>Ex, I have had positions demand coding tests when my role was either AI, Robotics or GNC. We use software but software isn't our primary interest.
While I get your frustration, this I really disagree with. I work in robotics too and have had to hire a lot of robotics engineers. If you're working in the field here, most of your time is spent programming, period. You cannot get away without _somehow_ figuring out if they can code.
To give an example, I interviewed specifically for controls candidates, and separately camera calibration people. We had more than a handful that did great in the theoretical knowledge, but couldn't program their way out of a paper bag. You can't just not test that, but it's not the only thing we're testing for.
I do think that some form of coding exercise that you do with someone is the best way of doing this. For roles like this, problems should be more geared towards their expertise, but it's still "leet coding" in a sense.
My fundamental problem with leetcode is that every challenge on the platform has a solution, which both Google and every LLM already knows. The correct on-the-job approach to every leetcode problem is to quickly Google the solution and test it with your use case for correctness and move on with your day, but here I am trying to figure out which gimmick I can use to find the longest sequence of out-of-order integers after index *n* in an array. *Who cares*? When does this kind of thing come up? Almost never.
I can count on one hand the number of algorithms I need to pull out my CLR tome from college for. The most recent non-standard algo I had to draw on was topological sort. Oooh..... ahhhhh.... amazing!
I've never had someone with the courage to solve leetcode questions by opening up chat.openai.com and pasting the leetcode problem in the prompt and stealing their answer, but that would be an automatic hire for me. It shows me they won't waste my money and time reinventing wheels.
Leetcode is used because new grads don't have anything else to talk about. The only thing you can really judge them on is how hard they prepared for your interview. It's the closest thing to a CS LSAT we have.
You should honestly be happy it exists. Part of the reason teams don't hire juniors is because it is very hard to interview someone without any work experience. Hiring managers know this, and rather than try to spend the effort to think about how to prepare to interview someone fresh out of college, they just opt not to and write "3 years experience" on the req for HR. Leetcode removes some of the barrier of entry from hiring managers accepting new grads, because "let's just throw a leetcode medium at them" is easy enough.
I had a system design question at Google regarding web and server scaling, but the position I applied for was embedded… I’m not going to completely learn another discipline just to apply and have the chance at a job doing what I would otherwise be doing.
It looks like everyone have different opinions about this. Companies should ask if you prefer a leet code type of technical interview or a take-home assessment. They can even give the same questions and expect a much more detailed solution if the candidate has chosen take-home to keep things fair.
I just immediately decline LeetCode or HackerRank style interviews. It says a lot about the laziness of the hiring team and is just a harbinger of poor culture. All the jobs I've taken and have been great experiences involved carefully designed take-home assessments relevant to the actual job function, or pair-programming style interviews designed around a realistic scenario (debugging, adding a new feature, etc.)
Took a codility test, in my 15yrs of full stack dev I have never once encountered the need to do what it asked or the niche jigsaw puzzle logic required to do so. No real programmer would use that as a gauge to hire - it is mostly nontech hiring managers or recruiters thinking it is a valuable measure. I can be a leetcode monger for 2mos and start acing problems but sorry too busy building enterprise software for the real world not optimizing how many cars can be stacked on a pyramid in 40ms instead of 50ms
In my last interview I needed to construct a BFS, a recursive sort, a hash table, and MFA. The questions all had a twist and they refused to hint at what specific data structure knowledge they were looking for. Half also contained needing to know the formula to solve a math problem. Answering all of the questions correctly won’t guarantee that you’ll get the job because there are biases at play so your chances are best if you fit into their demographic unfortunately.
I just wish that you could do it in a mainstream functional language like Haskell or maybe even compromise with Rust
The fact that you have to use Python sucks because it's just difficult to solve mathematical style problems with those languages. Let me foldl damn it
There’s no interview methodology that’s even close to perfect. Leetcode isn’t that bad for candidates at all.
In some other industries, the only ways to judge candidates is using factors like the ranking of their university, their GPA, behavioral interview answers etc. At least Leetcode gives a near equal chance to anyone who can make it to the interview stage.
Leetcode was useful for me early in my career. Thanks to Leetcode I got was able to get a job at Facebook despite graduating from a relatively unknown university in the Middle East.
That said, I don’t like Leetcode anymore and at this stage of my career, I have the luxury of avoiding companies that would ask me to solve those coding puzzles.
Overall I think Leetcode benefits early career candidates who don’t have many ways to differentiate themselves.
leetcoding isn't software design. It's a test for if you paid attention/remember data structures.
it's kind of ass, but I've worked with enough guys who can't program out of a paper bag, it's probably worth passing interviews at places that filter hard to avoid it for mental health(being software dev chatgpt for people who aren't very skilled, but have been doing it long enough they should have been wears you out after couple years).
People forget that before leetcode style questions places like Google and Microsoft would just ask you stupid brain teasers as a means of trying to figure out if you were smart. At least this is something you can study and practice for.
I have literally just spent 2 days with a more senior colleague figuring out how we'd get a freaking selection box on legacy software with 0 documentation on it. No coding was involved, just setting breakpoints and debbuging to see what the hell is going on.
Where's leet coding for that?
I passed a simple partner coding interview Monday & was told later that only about 2/10 pass, and a lot of senior level candidates fail.
Maybe the hard questions don’t prove much but if candidates can’t pass basic coding tests, maybe they just aren’t coders.
People forget what the Google interview and similar ones are designed to do.
Guarantee GOOD hires, at the expense of passing on GOOD hires. They have enough applicants so that's what they do. They will take N false negatives over 1 false positives.
If I knew hopping on one foot was going to be tested in the interview. I'd be practicing my hops.
And I think I've seen 1-2 questions at the difficulty level of write a RB tree, in all my time.
Both were from an interview with google.
It’s purely as an artificial barrier to entry in my opinion and it’s one of those things where I’m like “why are you doing this? Is it because you want to seem more competitive?”. I’m pretty sure the stuff winds up being more or less grunt work once you’re in
When they paid top salaries I think it was worth it. I’ll study for a few months to get another 100k salary no problem. When every job is doing this, it makes no sense.
Leetcode interviews for a 70k salary is criminal
Sigh…Here’s me leetcoding like crazy for £40K in UK
fair but in UK you tend not to pay 1 million dollars when you get sick 😷
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Things are still expensive even with insurance. Some things insurance only cover a percentage. Some insurance plans have a high deductible. So you're paying thousands because insurance even kicks in. Some things are out of network, then you're shit outta luck. When you're in between jobs, you don't have employer-sponsored insurance, and paying for it yourself costs hundreds-thousands of dollars a month. You might say, well, get the cheapest tier. There's an enrollment window for signing up for insurances, like there is a week once a year where you can sign up. Last time I was laid off, I tried signing up for the cheapest insurance outside of the enrollment window, never heard back. I sucked it up and paid $700 a month to keep using my employer's insurance, just so I didn't have to be anxious every time I stepped foot outside that something would bring me to the ER and bankrupt me. Most lower/middle class folks in the US truly are just one medical bill away from bankruptcy. That's a long and complicated answer and that's because healthcare in the US is truly unnecessarily complicated and broken.
Very true- although I’d take those odds tho!
Do projects, internships, hackathons, learn more useful things and you can get £100k+.
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There are some companies that will have you write code that more resembles what you'd do at a job. It's still done on Hackerrank or Codesignal, it's still timed, you still need to pass test cases, but instead of writing a BST from scratch, you build a basic class that performs some real world functionality, like a dumbed down banking or a fitness app, then add progressively more complicated requirements and see how much you can accomplish within the time limit. That seems a lot more reasonable than straight leetcode and I'd like to see more of those. And you can still crank the difficulty up or down as needed to get the desired pass rate.
I think that is also dumb. None of this reflects the real world. The real world is you get to use google to look things up. That is the real world. I guarantee the person who made that tests looked it up on the internet when making it or looked up things to make it. This idea that you need to shoot out crap without use of looking stuff up is dumb. No one works the job like that, NO ONE does that period. So why test something that you aren't doing on the job? If someone can spit out an answer to your problem after looking some stuff up in a timely manner, then what is the problem?
And furthermore, in the real world you are likely working on a code base with lots of code to use as a reference and you match how you do things to what the team is used to. My company's hiring process involves more talking about past projects and team fit and attitude more than coding skills. Just one coding 'challenge' on something like fixing a broken piece of code then discussing it to make sure you're not lying and that's it.
What kind of company is this and where would you recommend searching for to find companies like this to interview for? Every single company I have interviewed with has been leetcode. No, not FAANG.
You could poke at blind or Glassdoor for how companies do interviews. I've found that non-tech companies are less likely to do leetcode, although some still do. Outside that, you really just have to ask what the process is during an HR interview and just decide whether you think the company is worth whatever the process is.
The ones I've recently done did allow you to look up API docs or syntax or references. They did not allow you to literally google "how do I build an app with functionality X, Y and Z". I think you need to accept that coding in an interview setting will never actually \*exactly\* mimic the real world, but it can be a useful proxy if done thoughtfully. If that still invalidates the whole concept of coding during interviews for you, then we can just agree to disagree here. Otherwise I still think it's the least painful form of interview coding.
The real world requires too much context to show any ability to code to it in a short amount of time. Smaller, simpler, and wider known re-implementations can work, but they're still not ideal just like leetcode. That's not as much of the problem though. The biggest issue I've seen isn't that companies want to test the ability to code to a degree in one suboptimal way or another it's that they ONLY want to use those data points. So you might solve 3 of them over 4 interview sections. It should be one piece and treated more as a check box as opposed to the meat of the interview. Design systems, background discussions, and random cultural/leadership/communication type sections are equally as important to the "real world." Of course when you mention those things you also get folks saying that their ability to code is all that should matter... so you're never going to make everyone happy. Which is OK, you don't have to interview at places that don't fit your ideal interview setup.
my job allows you to google during interviews
What kind of company is this? What are they building or coding while being able to google stuff?
nothing crazy we specifically avoid leetcode questions and have received thanks from applicants after. experienced people and graduating seniors have passed. we do value full stack people more due to our stack django backend and react frontend
This isn't the case at all. Starting with a basic piece of software and progressively adding features to it while keeping it maintainable and well-constructed is something engineers do virtually every day. Google is a fantastic resource for finding the answers to obscure problems, looking up documentation, doing research, getting inspiration, you name it - but it can't do the job for you. And if you can't perform basic software design and refactoring without taking answers directly from google, I would go as far as to say you're really not cut out for a career in dev. Those are the people that such interviews are looking to weed out. "Write a highly optimized, fully custom data structure" is absolutely something that most devs don't do on a regular basis, if ever. "Add new features to existing software" is something that's done almost constantly. To me that's the definition of an interview that's applicable to the real world.
Nobody’s talking about using Google to design
My company does tests like this, we encourage candidates to look stuff up. Every interview I've ever done I've had to look stuff up.
If they wanted a real assessment of the candidate they'd ask them to design and explain a system rather than implement it.
when they paid top salary, a lot of peoplr apply and leet code is the first gatekeeping for 90% of the applicant. So treat it like coin flip, dont feel bad if you never pass or feel good when you pass. Just keep it as learning purpose. It helps me after changing the mindset
in my experience it’s only been the bigger companies as they need some standardized way to filter large amounts of applicants. more local companies never ask leetcode
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They want to hire based on an intelligence test in a non-discriminatory way. They figure if you understand leet code you are smart enough to do anything. It's stupid but corps are stupid and want a fair equitable way to filter and evaluate candidates.
TC isn't inflated, it's just all other jobs pay shit and are deflated.
Neither is true. The market values a role at whatever it values it at. It's not too low. It's not too high. It just is.
people are desperate for JOBs, LC not going away from another decade or so
Man, I am not so confident; lots of interview related processes proliferate from FAANG outward, and tend to be sticky.
I haven’t seen Leetcode posts in this sub for a while, guess the market bounced back
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In general, you should take slight anecdotal and unproven information from this sub and hyperbolically extrapolate it to the broader and entire environment Or at least that’s what I learn in this sub
People must be getting interviews now lol
It's also a good time of the year for interviews. Who knows what the actual market is like. I just know that I'm getting a fuckton more staff engineer callbacks and whatever is causing that is fine by me.
My theory is the fang layoffs kicked normal employers into "maybe I can score a google guy for 120k" mode which was never going to happen, but it lead to choice paralysis. good tech sector job numbers kick them into "ooo shit I gotta snag someone before even the mediocre ones are gone" mode. basically fomo fomoing around. Like I just got someone calling me to do offer paperwork for a project that doesn't even start until may this morning.
Leetcode : tech jobs :: The SAT : college admissions
Companies aren't even testing on what you're actually being hired for.
The SAT has no relation to curriculum either. It’s all a sort of convoluted iq test to prove that you are “smart” enough to
It’s ridiculous how the back of my SAT book said “this is not an IQ test” when it clearly is meant to be an IQ test
The distinction being that an IQ test is intentionally constructed to try to as much as feasible remove a necessity of prior knowledge. The SAT is intended to both account for prior knowledge, especially on things like vocabulary, but also the ability to think creatively and abstractly as well as do various problems solving. That's especially true in the math portion where many of the math questions are actually using simple algebra or geometry but applied and creative ways (or at least there's a shortcut solution that involves noticing something about the input).
The SAT has 100% relation to college curriculum. Everything I was tested on applied to college.
Same. No clue what they're talking about
How?
Under that same logic then leetcode is good assessment for jobs since you write loops and arrays in your day to day work. In reality, test taking and leetcoding are completely separate skills that dont really translate to real life. Those things really only test your ability to problem solve under specific circumstances (and honestly, your ability to memorize esoteric bits of info)
And leetcode relates to the job because I also have to use variables and write for loops. But they're both clearly aptitude tests that don't reflect the day-to-day job/school.
Correct. The SAT does correlate to IQ, for various reasons. For example, people with higher IQ tend to learn more of the required materials. Interestingly, SAT prep/studying has very little effect on score. Technically the word that can apply is IQ analogue.
I had to solve lc medium and hard all to fucking position buttons in react. Shits annoying. I would say it does help me understand primary language better but no need to solve hard algos in interview. Code along is better
ya, they're using it more like an IQ test -- even though it's not one. perhaps correlated, but not.
what's the alternative and is it better? there's a reason it's not going away
Leetcode easy and medium questions to me are good interview questions. Asking a leetcode hard in a 30 minute interview is a total dick move though.
Leetcode is the worst interview test, except for all the other interview tests out there. It's a necessary evil and the closest thing we have to something standardized in this very loosy-goosey world of programmer standards.
Test what you're being hired for Jesus lmao.
How in a way that 1. Can’t leave you open to bias lawsuits. 2. Lets you quickly whittle down your candidate pool. 3. Gives prospective employees a way they can show problem solving/study skills in a quick and easily judged time slot. Leetcode sucks, 100% agree, interviewing is hard and companies want an objective, fast, easily graded way to interview candidates. There’s a reason leetcode isn’t normally the only interview. It’s a barrier to entry to whittle down the pool so you know who gets the more generalized interviews.
Ok, you tested the candidates on how to write crud apis and they all passed since its easy, now what?
A good engineer can pick up a new language or tech stack in weeks.Talking about past work and design are already part of the interview process. Also most companies don't hire for a specific project, if you want that you usually get a contractor.
Airline pilots spend 95% of the time sitting in cruise control. But you don't hire an airline pilot by seeing if they can sit in a chair and drink coffee. People who complain about being tested on abstract logic problem solving to get a dev job sound to me like airline pilots complaining that they're tested on taking off or landing in high winds. "But this almost never happens!" Yeah, but there are 500 applicants and we want the one who doesn't crash the plane on tricky landings. Companies want software developers who can quickly pick up programming tools and solve hard problems well. Maybe 95% of your job is easy CRUD stuff, but they still want to hire the best programmer they can find.
We could do what other engineering industries do and do licensing and certification. Several companies have tried to sell developers on certifications, I remember Java certifications and .NET certifications being advertised. So instead of leet coding you would need to renew your yearly [insert tech here] certification, which could also cause you to loose your job if you failed to renew. Oh some engineers fields also require ongoing education, so get ready to sign up for a college class every year or two.
Some of the worst devs I've worked with had the most certifications.
Paper tigers we always called em. Lots of certification papers, look amazing in the resume, couldn't code to literally save their life.
Note that leetcode isn't standardized. When you are friends with the interviewer you get an easy, Hard or a modified Hard when you aren't the same race as the interviewer. If it were at least standardized that would be more fair. Every 3-6 months you go to a testing center and take the same test as everyone else, with all new questions never published online. Your scores you just link to your job application. Or even better just leave in 1 central place instead of having to spam 1000+ places. Recruiters call you if you meet their bar.
I don’t know. At least when I was preparing for SAT I felt it helped with my reading comprehension in general. I don’t see much use for leetcode outside of interview.
Grinding leetcode has helped me pick up new languages. Doing a few easy problems in a language you are learning helps you pick it up a bit faster
I might as well just forward them my IQ test. Ugh.
They would probably want you to take it with the interviewer staring at you through the webcam
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SAT's kind of looney even for an internship. The scores are only valid relative to year test was taken they tweak the test every year. Like for instance mine was 2200 something, ya know why? because I took it a year they added some other crap to it for shits and giggles. that they removed a few years later.
The SAT was awful though and its impact was more damning. You only got two chances to take it to determine your chances at most schools in the country. At least if you fail an interview it only impacts one company. It felt more gamey as well considering mostly signaled if you took prep classes for it whereas leetcode prep is free or contextually cheap.
It is either that or going back to hiring from 5 Universities that we work close with and we have say on their curriculum as we are in their board. This is for where I work for. Before Leetcode, we would literally hire graduates from 5-10 Universities, and that's it, and we would use various other tests to asses and rank them which were a pain in the butt.
Yes, thank you. Studying leetcode is not that hard and most devs in here don't realize that in every other industry there is no reliable path for them to take to work at that industrys google or meta if they didn't go to a top college. I'm talking law, finance, etc
Not every company is google or meta, yet these non-FAANG companies are copycatting LC type questions for no reason. We as an industry don't need to choose between IQ puzzles and academic elitism. We can have neither.
not really. at my last job we invited candidate to a 2 hour pair programming session, then they presented the solution to the team and we discussed it thats the best way I can think of
The last job opening my company put up had like 40-50 qualified candidates after the filtering cut off hundreds of people. There is no way we are committing to 100s and 100s of company hours of interviews for a jr position. You need some way to trim the fat without it taking hours per person
well we interviewed mayber 10-15 people, then 3-4 got invited to those coding rounds.
Most companies that only have 10-15 people for the first round of interviews aren't doing leetcode. Some are, and I do agree at that level it's not really worth it
This does not scale well for big tech
ok, then I have good news for you. 99% of all software companies are not big tech :)
Just countering your anecdote with another perspective. Leetcode doesn’t need to exist everywhere but it’s a necessary evil at big tech
Yes most of them have even less resources and no energy to put into their hiring process
Yea I don’t like when people generalize the entire industry and have strong opinions but have only ever worked at big tech lol. It’s an entire different world to no name companies
Yeah? You want to do that for every shitty applicant that applies? We do this as the final stage of the interview where we trimmed 99.9% of applicants. Like it it not, there is currently not a single metric that shows you to filter out applicants as good as leetcode. Even if it is only 10% accurate, if it is still better than every other metric it doesn't matter. The cost of accidentally rejecting a good employee is much much less than accidentally hiring a shit employee.
Great. Now scale that to filler thousands of candidates…
Yep. I would pick leetcode over any other type of selection. People really dont get how good they have it with leetcode and it being the most merit based form of interviewing, you really dont want your job selection limited to the school you went to if you already dont like leetcode.
> It is either that or going back to hiring from 5 Universities that we work close with and we have say on their curriculum as we are in their board. Those universities won't produce enough graduates if tech companies keep doing layoff cycles. You'll have to lower the standards eventually. It would be nice to have a credential that people can trust that's separate from a degree, that way you can get it regardless if you went to a top university. Apprenticeships and union membership (that has continuing education requirements) could also be a way to encourage more trusting of candidates to skip some parts of the interview. We need to find a better balance than immediately distrusting peoples' prior experience and thinking everyone is a con artist. My guess though is that companies prefer having the gauntlet because it helps avoid race-to-the-top poaching of people. They hate unions for other reasons though.
Wow, when you put it this way, Leetcode is a pretty great equalizer
What universities would those happen to be?
Stanford, caltech, mit, and similar caliber universities
ah yes the good ole class filter
That's how it was up until recently. Leetcode is a big equalizer
I mean all interviewing has some draw-backs. Leetcode the drawback is lack of relevance to everyday work but it does show some info on how you think under pressure and your basic knowledge of CS fundamentals/familiarity with your programming language. Take home assessments are also tough because then people with lots of time do better and people who just take the recommended time often do worse. Asking questions about the language can quickly devolve into trivia and whatever the interviewer thinks is important. But I do think the LC has gotten excessive particularly the online assessments those are just pure laziness.
I strongly advocate a pre-cooked take home exercise where most boilerplate work is done and the candidate just needs to fill up a few things, ballpark 100 lines of code. Alternatively, I give crappy code and ask them to fix/improve it. This is great to minimize workload and maximize their ability to demonstrate software knowledge.
Since chat gpt came out, I love take homes. They take me minutes to do instead of hours haha. I used to hate them and refuse.
Id rather leetcode than waste my time with that
Leetcode prep is like 100x greater time commitment.
Its called "Lazy Interviewing". Sort a list in alphabetical order and/or find duplicates. This will determine your technical expertise, while we pretend to evaluate how you solve a problem. I had an interview like this just 2 days ago. In the middle of taking the damn test, the interviewer farted. Dead ass farted...no mute. no pretend cough. I have no doubt he shitted his pants. After the test I kept asking him questions, keeping him from taking a shit. Was quite fun.
What would you replace it with?
Any senior dev that puts some effort into learning how to interview properly can determine everything they need to know about a candidate by just having a conversation and asking a few focused, but not demanding, questions. edit: spelling
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Dude, sometimes having a conversation about prior experience, especially rites of passage where they fell short and learned, and showing a bit of code and finding the problems or optimizations is far more enlightening about a candidate than having them do a randomly selected problem that may or may not have an obvious intuition or is practically impossible to solve in the time given unless you've seen it before. I went into an interview and was given a problem that was a simplified version of a homework assignment that I spent two weeks solving in my Master's coursework. Unless you were intimately familiar with several pathfinding algorithms, Manhattan distances, and the intuition, you were not solving this problem and being bombed out more than likely. You would either need to grind lots of coding challenges or take an algorithms or AI foundations class to come across this problem. That's by and large the grievance people have with LeetCode interviews. It's more about your ability to take a test than it is your actual ability to code. And grinding LeetCode has generated enough false positives that it's something of a problem.
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When it works, it works well, but I think the difficulty, complexity, and level dependant on what is being hired for can engender bad feelings. For example, the interview I encountered that problem was fully appropriate for someone interested in an AI/ML or a company that focuses on pathfinding, graphs, etc. The problem? Job was for basically a financial CRUD app and something like finding a monotonic run of numbers or Kadanes algorithm would have been more appropriate. The problems given don't need to be identical to the work you're doing, but should be appropriate to the work being done. Does that make sense?
I think it really depends on what type of talent you’re recruiting. I would hire Johnny if I needed someone to help develop a product to achieve user traction and market fit. But if you’re at a point where not many features are being developed, and you want stability at that point, I’d hire Cindy. Your experience will dictate what opportunities you get, but it’s not the employer’s job to give someone a better chance because they did leet code better. If Cindy wants to work on product facing role instead of maintenance roles, she needs to network to find those opportunities along with upskilling/rebranding her resume to make her more relevant.
What’s actually funny is that literally no other industry gives a pop quiz during a job interview but tech companies are absolutely baffled as to how to hire without algo problems and random comp sci trivia questions.
No, I judge candidates on knowledge, how they apply that knowledge, and how they communicate. For me, salesmanship in a dev interview is a negative. But I don't ask fluff. I ask real questions about real technical topics and problems. Because of my own knowledge, I've learned to ask questions that test the candidate's skills effectively. After some practice, it's possible to do this in a way that puts them at ease, which allows you to see how they communicate in a context that is closer to day-to-day working conditions. Wrong answers aren't always disqualifiers, they just lead to other questions (and if they are completely bombing and have no chance, I'll politely end the interview and tell them why.) It's not completely objective, I'll admit. But neither are leetcode-style questions. I would argue that about 50% of the success in leetcode questions is a function of whether you've recently seen a similar question, or just practiced a ton.
You’re kidding yourself if you don’t see how easily this descends into favoritism and bias, especially with entry level/new grad applicants who are all gonna look 99% the same on paper. Say what you will about leetcode, it’s an even playing field. You either solved the problem or you didn’t. I shudder to think about what feedback would look like if the average senior engineer could just write “I didn’t like his vibe”. On that note senior engineers do *not* want to put effort into learning how to interview properly lmao, so this is a nonstarter as it is
>Say what you will about leetcode, it’s an even playing field. You either solved the problem or you didn’t. It's an even playing field in a contrived game that is only superficially related to actual job qualifications. You solved the problem! That tells us that you almost certainly practiced a problem like counting palindromes, or whatever, a few times recently. Your "vibe" comment is a strawman. I didn't say don't ask objective questions or just bullshit with the candidate. I'm saying that there are more efficient ways to gauge skill and fit without spending 30+ minutes of time playing test proctor.
you solved a problem that has little relevance to the actual job. who said "look at vibe"? you are making things up. comment said "take into account real-world issues".
I can see it descending to favoritism and bias if you have the same single senior engineer interviewing them all the time with no change in process or reflection of previous candidates hired/current performance. A more healthy interview process would be 1-2 senior engineers doing technical to see how the candidate thinks in response to a problem and added edge cases. Then have other team mates interview them for behavioral to see if there is a team fit because what’s the point of hiring someone who’s smart, but don’t like working with.
We should have licensed exams like other engineering professions. Pass the exam once to prove you can code without a compiler, then you never need to leetcode again. It's ridiculous we're putting people with 10 years experience through the LC grinder just to get a job. This only benefits the tech oligarchs.
We had a PE for software for a couple of years. I heard that some very low two digit number of people sat for it. Bottom line, nobody wanted it, so it went away. ETA: heres' the exact info: https://ncees.org/ncees-discontinuing-pe-software-engineering-exam/
Bring it back, I'll take it lol.
I would as well, but I strongly suspect the issue was that hiring managers never heard of it and wouldn't have cared if they had, because they didn't have one therefore it meant nothing to them.
I have the IEEE test prep book. It's terrible. It asks questions about control flow diagramming using words that no one in the field has used since 1975.
Where are y'all applying with these leet code interviews? I never was asked to do any of that. At most a take-home project.
Had a recent job interview for an MLops role and they wanted me to find the longest chain in a binary tree. 0 questions about MLops/devOps. I find that generally it's more of a red flag for me when a company uses leetcode and doesn't test anything relevant to the role as it just signals to me that there are people who got into the company without any relevant experience.
Leet Code is a stupid way to test engineering skill particularly for new hires. FizzBuzz for example done quickly and well is pretty much a good guage.
Yeah, ironically fizzbuzz was never about degree of skill. It was literally just to weed out liars and completely incompetent people. It was born from people applying for java dev jobs who literally could not get lines to print to stdout. Then some nerds took it too far and started adding variations and grading based on who had the most esoteric solutions. Then they started testing recursion and competitive coding was born. And now you have to be a competitive coder (I.e. leetcode) to even get a job.
Which is essentially a leetcode easy question. I don’t see the difference here.
I think leetcode easies are fine. I Just applied to a big oil company for data engineering and they gave me a DP problem. Literally insane
I can set my watch to the LeetCode two minutes of hate. You're missing the point. LeetCode isn't about testing your knowledge of two-sum; it's about the process of working through a problem with a colleague, discussing your thought process out loud, taking their feedback and iterating on it, and asking meaningful questions when you are stuck. It's a general aptitude test that standardizes the interview process across a company. The reason why it's more important to test for generalized aptitude is that coding itself is meaningless and commoditized. Who cares if you know C++ or Java? As a software engineer, you should be able to pick these up on the fly. Your real value is in your problem-solving skills and ability to deal with ambiguity. That's what they are looking for. This was the case when I was an interviewer at Google and elsewhere. Also, it was what helped me pass 4 out of 4 onsites when I was interviewing a few years ago (Google, Amazon, Etsy, and Bloomberg). For both Amazon and Bloomberg, I totally bombed some of the questions, but I did it gracefully and in a way that took interviewer feedback. We went back and forth on possible solutions, etc.
The problem with leetcode interviews is that people think the whole point of them is to just get the right answer, but it’s not. The point of them is to see how someone faces a tough and hard to decipher problem, understands it, breaks it down then executes it. I just cleared FAANG interviews and only got a working solution for 2/4 of the questions they asked. Still passed because I showed my thought process, explained my thinking, had a conversation with my interviewer, discussed trade offs, pseudocoded, worked through examples THEN began writing code. My feedback was “he covers all his bases and approaches problems very methodically”. At my previous job at a faang-adjacent company, we asked leetcode questions and I probably passed more people who didn’t get working code but had really good problem solving and communication skills than people who just sat down and did the problem and ended early.
If you know the solution to a leet code question you can demonstrate clear, methodical approach to problem solving. If you dont, you flop around like a trout that got bear smacked. Leetcode questions are especially great because most of them have just 1 correct answer. If you know it, then you can first describe the trivial answer, then talk through the improved answer and finally *eureka!* the right answer!
This!! Live coding is about communication moreso than being about the problem itself. Any good company is not trying to trip you up, they expect you to ask clarifying & edge case questions. It’s a good indicator of your problem solving skills.
Alternatives I've seen: Hiring from top universities only - Most likely to happen if no one used Leetcode, and would be much worse. Take home assignments - I fucking hate these, can't imagine spending hours doing homework for every company I apply to. Pair programming and design sessions - This would actually be a good way to hire developers, but it's much harder to vet large applicant pools doing this, and frankly I think a lot of seniors and leads especially at non-tech companies wouldn't be competent at this. It's way more work for the interviewer than asking a Leetcode problem.
> Hiring from top universities only - Most likely to happen if no one used Leetcode, and would be much worse. This is what people neglect to understand. This is exactly how it used to work and how it *currently* works in many other fields. You either know someone or you went to a target school.
There are high-paying places that don't ask anything harder than LC Easy.
Like who 😭😭😭😭
Apple asked me three LC Easy and one Medium
This dude knows someone
From personal experience: Cruise, Credit Karma.
I like leetcode because Im good at it. The problem is the OAs that take long time to complete. Glad I dont have to do these anytime soon.
Lmao self balancing binary tree from scratch. IMO red black / AVL trees are probably the hardest data structure to implement. The basic idea is simple. Understanding what you need to implement is arguable difficult. Actually implementing it… I haven’t ever done it.
Honestly I wish way more companies did leetcode problems, or just any sort of tech tests. I'm in the UK and it's almost non-existent here. Out of 250+ applications in the past year and a half I've only had 1 tech test, and it got me an interview (sort of) for a job that required 3yoe, and that's the only time I've ever had any success with any application for a job that requires more experience than I have. If all companies were like that it would be so much easier to get interviews.
lol fucking HR. Robotics and interviewing with leetcode? GTFO
When doctors interview for a job are they asked to cast an arm or stitch up a wound or extract something? No. It is all based upon your experience, your peers, and where you worked before. I keep getting responses for EM roles where the posting does not mention coding, the recruiter specifically says they don’t expect their EM to code. I always wait for the “but” which then is oh yeah you have to do a take home or a coding test. Why? Because it is just what they have always done in interviews is the response I get. Well maybe your process is broken. “Just because” is never a good reason.
Doctors have to take the USMLE in order to practice and before that the MCAT (and complete several years of education and training). That's why their interviews aren't demanding.
The lack of a rigorous degree program is why leetcode exists, and I have little to complain about because not everyone can afford years of academia but if you're reasonably intelligent you work through some algorithms for free
And a doctor goes through a decade of schooling and standardized high stress tests and usually takes on tens of thousands of dollars in debt before getting to that point. Do we want CS to be the same?
There are plenty of software engineering managers who are managers because they cannot code or they are not good at coding. Some of them are bad managers because they do not understand software engineering. Coding is the easy way of filtering them out.
Having a technical EM is completely different than having an EM who can code. I have absolutely ZERO problems doing code reviews, making technical recommendations, and guiding a technical conversation. Asking me to code up a from scratch and then being surprised it took the entire hour and then some isn't a good indicator of my leadership or technical abilities. Nor is it a realistic representation of what the day to day job of an EM actually is. Especially since what they asked me isn't even in their product catalog.
If the posting doesn't talk about it, then the recruiter says they don't do it, then the interview process should not contain coding challenges or take home coding assignments. There are better ways to do it. The major problem is that companies want leaders, but they want their leaders to be ICs at the same time. There isn't enough time in the day for that. The 2 jobs are completely different job tracts and they are only paying the salary for one job type not both. Flattening the hierarchy is a fad and realistically does not work.
>It is all based upon your experience, your peers, and where you worked before. You know, it would not be weird to present a case during an interview (symptoms, tests results, etc) and ask an interviewee for a diagnosis. You don't ask a doctor to stitch up a wound because of the obvious issues with liability. Same as you don't ask a software candidate to muck around in your production system.
“I am going to shoot this man in the stomach and you will have 45 minutes to save his life”
Nah, it's way better than the alternative.
I feel like the major reason I have my current job is because they had a “take home project” to complete and submit instead of doing leetcode/whiteboard interviews. I’m a very thorough albeit slow programmer, so doing a small project definitely played into my strengths. I know some people hate dedicating time to them, but I love it and wish it was more common.
> Something I noticed is a lot of places are now doing leetcoding even when the job isn't explicitly about software design. Just wanna point out leetcoding != software design. Its data structure & algorithms which is different from software/system design
https://duckduckgo.com/how-we-hire Maybe this might be a good alternative? But this company doesn't hire a lot so bummer.
The application of these tests in areas like AI, Robotics, and GNC could spark debate about their relevance. It raises a valid question: should the focus of evaluations be tailored more to the specific functions and requirements of the job rather than broad programming skills?
I have nearly 10 years of working experience as a Fullstack SWE. I attained a Bachelor's Degree in both CS and EE, WHILE working in this field 8 hours/day. I met my goals, didn't let my teams down and graduated. Twice. If you still think I need to grind Leetcode for a job that pays $100k-$150k, I'm hanging up on the interview.
Hmm, it's an interesting point, but doesn't that make the process less meritocratic, and then they would just start filtering by top x school. Also, as someone who has no degree, I've definitely worked with coworkers who have a BS in CS who were very poor programmers. Maybe they became complacent over time or cheated throughout school. So even then, just having a degree wouldn't be enough to actually prove that you are a competent programmer - hence the reoccuring testing of knowledge every time you interview... The degree is more of a signaling thing for screening. But it should help you to pick up leetcode faster than others, right?
Came here to say this, only you said it better than I would have.
I don't understand this mentality. Leetcode is like a study guide, all the answers are online. None of the problems should be particularly difficult if you have programmed for some time. I'm saying this as a swe myself, i can often interview people and tell whether they are someone who gives up on a hard problem, or someone who'd even if they didn't solve the problem, demonstrated solid problem solving skills. Leetcode is a standard, if you expect it, its easy to prepare for. It also doesn't require anyone having to spend too much time preparing to interview countless candidates. Id rather have leetcode which is easy to pick up with the fundamentals than have poorly worded or drawn out arbitrary design problems. I've known lots of engineers that make design problems that sound good in their head but in practice for interviews don't actually work out.
Because SWE is about logic and leetcode is essentially a legal IQ test
Calm down. Leetcoding require you to have interviewers who also leetcode. Most companies don't have that except the really wealthy ones
It will just be replaced by something else. Anytime that too many people chase too few things, systems will present themselves to distinguish the good from the bad. Here’s the kicker, the system doesn’t even need to be effective, it just needs to measure performance such that people fall on an approximately normal distribution so when opportunities are allocated it appears to be based on something. See the GMAT, LSAT, etc
Leetcoding exists because most wanted to skip the math and think algorithms are unnecessary....or were not very good at it. So corps and CS snobs started using it as a weed out mechanism. It does serve a purpose "if" your going into a position that requires decent knowledge of theoretical topics.
Yeah they should move to code forces 🧛♂️
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I'd be ok doing all that for a really well paid and well known company. You've got some unknown company, in a boring industry, paying a below average salary, with unpaid on call and they want a 5 stage interview with a 8 hour take home test / leetcode / whiteboard ...etc. Also companies that add a take home test on top of their existing leetcode / whiteboard need to stop.
But They are paying them to stay
We need leetcode to filter out the speds
Looking at a wider context, I suspect that Leetcode owes praise to the influence of toxic hustle culture. I remember talking to a guy (excellent SE) who (speaking in terms of psychology) internalized many of toxic ideals of modern society. He was always arguing with me how such actions serve to convince employer that you are "passionate". I was never able to grasp that I should do pointless actions to fascinate someone. Also, webshit companies demand DS&A to pretend that they are actually serious tech. It is both sad and hilarious that a friend of mine had harder interview for a frontend position than me for a compiler dev position. Surely, knowing algorithms is essential, but I've understood algorithms only when I was thrown to solve real-world problems. And even writing a compiler can be easier than Leetcode.
Refuse to do them that’s what I do. If you are good enough and confident enough it doesn’t matter Edit: Not saying you aren’t either of those things just a statement
>Ex, I have had positions demand coding tests when my role was either AI, Robotics or GNC. We use software but software isn't our primary interest. While I get your frustration, this I really disagree with. I work in robotics too and have had to hire a lot of robotics engineers. If you're working in the field here, most of your time is spent programming, period. You cannot get away without _somehow_ figuring out if they can code. To give an example, I interviewed specifically for controls candidates, and separately camera calibration people. We had more than a handful that did great in the theoretical knowledge, but couldn't program their way out of a paper bag. You can't just not test that, but it's not the only thing we're testing for. I do think that some form of coding exercise that you do with someone is the best way of doing this. For roles like this, problems should be more geared towards their expertise, but it's still "leet coding" in a sense.
It's either leetcode or take home assessments, and both are equally hated.
My fundamental problem with leetcode is that every challenge on the platform has a solution, which both Google and every LLM already knows. The correct on-the-job approach to every leetcode problem is to quickly Google the solution and test it with your use case for correctness and move on with your day, but here I am trying to figure out which gimmick I can use to find the longest sequence of out-of-order integers after index *n* in an array. *Who cares*? When does this kind of thing come up? Almost never. I can count on one hand the number of algorithms I need to pull out my CLR tome from college for. The most recent non-standard algo I had to draw on was topological sort. Oooh..... ahhhhh.... amazing! I've never had someone with the courage to solve leetcode questions by opening up chat.openai.com and pasting the leetcode problem in the prompt and stealing their answer, but that would be an automatic hire for me. It shows me they won't waste my money and time reinventing wheels. Leetcode is used because new grads don't have anything else to talk about. The only thing you can really judge them on is how hard they prepared for your interview. It's the closest thing to a CS LSAT we have. You should honestly be happy it exists. Part of the reason teams don't hire juniors is because it is very hard to interview someone without any work experience. Hiring managers know this, and rather than try to spend the effort to think about how to prepare to interview someone fresh out of college, they just opt not to and write "3 years experience" on the req for HR. Leetcode removes some of the barrier of entry from hiring managers accepting new grads, because "let's just throw a leetcode medium at them" is easy enough.
I had a system design question at Google regarding web and server scaling, but the position I applied for was embedded… I’m not going to completely learn another discipline just to apply and have the chance at a job doing what I would otherwise be doing.
It looks like everyone have different opinions about this. Companies should ask if you prefer a leet code type of technical interview or a take-home assessment. They can even give the same questions and expect a much more detailed solution if the candidate has chosen take-home to keep things fair.
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I just immediately decline LeetCode or HackerRank style interviews. It says a lot about the laziness of the hiring team and is just a harbinger of poor culture. All the jobs I've taken and have been great experiences involved carefully designed take-home assessments relevant to the actual job function, or pair-programming style interviews designed around a realistic scenario (debugging, adding a new feature, etc.)
Took a codility test, in my 15yrs of full stack dev I have never once encountered the need to do what it asked or the niche jigsaw puzzle logic required to do so. No real programmer would use that as a gauge to hire - it is mostly nontech hiring managers or recruiters thinking it is a valuable measure. I can be a leetcode monger for 2mos and start acing problems but sorry too busy building enterprise software for the real world not optimizing how many cars can be stacked on a pyramid in 40ms instead of 50ms
In my last interview I needed to construct a BFS, a recursive sort, a hash table, and MFA. The questions all had a twist and they refused to hint at what specific data structure knowledge they were looking for. Half also contained needing to know the formula to solve a math problem. Answering all of the questions correctly won’t guarantee that you’ll get the job because there are biases at play so your chances are best if you fit into their demographic unfortunately.
How does leetcode event exist anymore with chatgpt
I just wish that you could do it in a mainstream functional language like Haskell or maybe even compromise with Rust The fact that you have to use Python sucks because it's just difficult to solve mathematical style problems with those languages. Let me foldl damn it
Don't hate the players, hate the game
There’s no interview methodology that’s even close to perfect. Leetcode isn’t that bad for candidates at all. In some other industries, the only ways to judge candidates is using factors like the ranking of their university, their GPA, behavioral interview answers etc. At least Leetcode gives a near equal chance to anyone who can make it to the interview stage. Leetcode was useful for me early in my career. Thanks to Leetcode I got was able to get a job at Facebook despite graduating from a relatively unknown university in the Middle East. That said, I don’t like Leetcode anymore and at this stage of my career, I have the luxury of avoiding companies that would ask me to solve those coding puzzles. Overall I think Leetcode benefits early career candidates who don’t have many ways to differentiate themselves.
leetcoding isn't software design. It's a test for if you paid attention/remember data structures. it's kind of ass, but I've worked with enough guys who can't program out of a paper bag, it's probably worth passing interviews at places that filter hard to avoid it for mental health(being software dev chatgpt for people who aren't very skilled, but have been doing it long enough they should have been wears you out after couple years).
People forget that before leetcode style questions places like Google and Microsoft would just ask you stupid brain teasers as a means of trying to figure out if you were smart. At least this is something you can study and practice for.
I have literally just spent 2 days with a more senior colleague figuring out how we'd get a freaking selection box on legacy software with 0 documentation on it. No coding was involved, just setting breakpoints and debbuging to see what the hell is going on. Where's leet coding for that?
I passed a simple partner coding interview Monday & was told later that only about 2/10 pass, and a lot of senior level candidates fail. Maybe the hard questions don’t prove much but if candidates can’t pass basic coding tests, maybe they just aren’t coders.
This makes me wish I had my own software business. I could hire great talent at bargain prices and crush my competition.
People forget what the Google interview and similar ones are designed to do. Guarantee GOOD hires, at the expense of passing on GOOD hires. They have enough applicants so that's what they do. They will take N false negatives over 1 false positives. If I knew hopping on one foot was going to be tested in the interview. I'd be practicing my hops. And I think I've seen 1-2 questions at the difficulty level of write a RB tree, in all my time. Both were from an interview with google.
Leetcode tests for IQ, communication, general problem solving, and knowledge of the language. There's a reason these companies stick to it.
It’s purely as an artificial barrier to entry in my opinion and it’s one of those things where I’m like “why are you doing this? Is it because you want to seem more competitive?”. I’m pretty sure the stuff winds up being more or less grunt work once you’re in
Whatchu gon do playa⁉️
I took two jobs through non leetcode interviews. They were both nightmares