Are Leetcode questions no longer in?

Apr 17, 2021 11 Comments

I have about 6 years of experience working at Microsoft/Azure Compute. I've recently decided to look for opportunities that afford more flexible remote work options but I was too busy to "grind the LC", as they say. Maybe I just got lucky but none of my interviewers gave me any byzantine DP/Backtracking algorithm questions. It seems like most of the coding questions have moved to being more practical. I.e Here's a business/product requirement for your code, interpret it, ask questions and code it out on Coderpad and then iterate on it with new requirements or optimizations. There were also a lot more day-in-the-life of type exercises like walking through someone else's code or debugging a service outage. Maybe it's just because I was interviewing for more senior roles and I purposely stayed away from interviewing for Google (ain't got time for that HC + team matching non-sense). The companies I interviewed for were mostly pre-ipo or smaller public companies, all based in SF (i.e Slack, Hashi, Elastic, Square, etc...and AWS b/c why not). I was lucky enough to receive offers from a good selection of them.

Has the industry as a whole as moved away from LC questions in the last five years? It could also be that the companies I interviewed for has a lower tech bar than F/G or just always have had a more inclusive interviewing culture.

#engineering #software #interview

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TOP 11 Comments
  • You ppl don't get it. Its not LC, everyone knows that. What top companies want is ppl who can work 10+ hrs. When you prep for LC while doing your daily job you are sacrificing all your free time for a long period of time so much that its now your second nature. That is what is expected from you - work extra long hours w/o any complains
    Apr 17, 2021 0
  • Boeing
    gorpigo

    Go to company page Boeing

    gorpigo
    God I hope so, it still seems like LC is heavily used for entry level/new grad roles however. For instances where the candidates don’t otherwise have much field experience.
    Apr 17, 2021 1
    • OP
      Yea that's my guess as well. LC questions are a common normalizer for new grads. My current team in Azure still makes candidates for senior level roles go through asinine tree/graph questions even though our day-to-day is mostly writing json and ops.
      Apr 17, 2021
  • New
    jbLK15

    New

    jbLK15
    I think it depends entirely on the company. Seriously, I didn't know of Leetcode until I tried to apply to certain companies. Many organisations don't use them at all even before now. And those that use them haven't stopped using them.
    Apr 17, 2021 0
  • Amazon
    Amazon-AWS

    Go to company page Amazon

    Amazon-AWS
    No they're definitely still in.
    Apr 18, 2021 0
  • Oracle
    ghxt38

    Go to company page Oracle

    ghxt38
    In my opinion,
    These algorithm questions may seem useless at first but if you know how a priority queue works or when to use and Arraylist and when to use a Linkedlist, it will make you a better developer and also improves the product a lot. An O(n^2) vs O(n) solution can make a massive difference for a distributed system at a scale like Microsoft, Google and Facebook.

    LC questions are very much the right thing for software engineering interviews.
    May 19, 2021 1
    • Of course, like Trapping rain water. There is a difference between know how DS work compared to solving 2L medium with tricky 3pointer , sliding window or some nonsense techniques in 30minutes. 100% will fail without looking at LC first. It isn’t that they know this algorithms, but no way you can come up with the same expected solution in the expected time without practicing over several hours.
      Mar 3