Are Leetcode questions no longer in?
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
comments
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.