Can't we find better ways of assessing SWE candidates other than some 'leetcode' questions. I find it funny that people with actual engineering skills and experience are shown the door just because they dont leetcode at night.
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Be careful what you wish for. Leetcode is the lesser evil in a lot of cases. I know a team where a lot of people like to insist on “practical” interviews. The actual outcome is that, instead of being good at algorithms, you have to be good (on the spot) at concurrency and multithreading, file I/O, serialization, system design, networking, and algorithms. And since people actually know to prepare for Leetcode... many are slaughtered.
Well. That’s what they should test. If you are really a good software engineer you should be good on the spot at that and not at figuring out a DP algorithm that it probably took the original author days (or weeks/months) to come out with. Plus I prefer to hire a person that spent 6 months studying concurrency, multithreading, etc in place of memorizing leetcode algorithms. Maybe the interviewers don’t want to do the switch because not even them know those subjects?
My thoughts exactly. At the end of the day we are hiring because we want someone to write real software. Of course this is different when hiring for a graduate position.
“I find it funny that people with actual engineering skills and experience are shown the door just because they dont leetcode at night.” Lol. Ok.
Tl;dr: if you can’t Leetcode too, you’re lazy. I used to think the same until I saw how negligent I was being with my own designs and coding after I started leetcoding. I saw how rusted I was. Instead of putting an effort to think about what’s being done, I was just being lazy. Examples? I was ok’ing inefficient implementations because I really didn’t analyze complexity or whether that was the right data structure.
Play the game 🏀
Yeah thats the only way. I am just thinking about it from a broad perspective. Not that it affects me personally
So whatever process you come up with, would become the same! Why do you think asking practical questions is better? If this becomes the norm, why do you think there will no leetpractical.com? Problem is not leetcode. Problem is over reliance on it. Most of the interviewers outside top companies themselves are not good coders - they expect the answer which they know. And this is the problem. Good companies don’t ask you coding questions for the sake of it. They genuinely try to see your approach to the problem. And if you can move towards answer with small hints. If the interviewer is looking for right answer at the first go, you are at wrong place. For certain companies, knowledge of DS and algos is a must and they want to hire generalists because that’s how they roll. Even then, leetcode will be maximum 1-2 rounds . Other two rounds will check for design and problem solving. So if someone gets rejected in coding rounds, it’s simply their fault. Play by the rules of the game! Changing the rules is just wishful thinking!!
What this guy said. The type of problem asked is not the issue, leetcoding itself is. There's been an arms race as candidates study leetcode, causing interviewers to ask every harder questions. Also, it's usually easy to assess if someone had just memorized a solution or actually understands it. If you're so good, a couple weeks of leetcoding and you should be killing the interviews. You can't have it both ways man.
There is no easy way to standardize the interviews taken by different interviewers with different candidates. Whatever standard “practical” methods u will come up with will be well taught, distributed and practiced across this community, so there is no escaping the fact that people here are competitive and willing to work hard. Non standard interviews is not an option, and that’s not even a debate.
TC or GTFO 🤣