Everyone keeps doing these LEETCODE interviews when we all know that might be good way to judge a Fresher or Intern level but no one with a regular job has time to cram "cracking the coding interview" or algorithms. Sure it might be easier for day to day developers but coding algorithms in 1 hr Interview where we all know you can only "recall the exact exercise" and not right away come up with best sorting algorithm. It is kinda becoming defacto for QA, Systems Engineer as well ? What about other judging criterias 1. Communication 2. Thought process 3. Team work 4. Leadership and ownership 5. Handling a new project 6. Approach to a problem, troubleshooting What are your views ?
What's the point of leadership and ownership if the code is O(n), when it needs to be O(1). Leadership in throwing more servers to the problem? Ownership of a giant mess?
For a leader, I think it's good enough if they know O(1) is better than O(n), as long as the people they lead know how to make it O(1)
Fwiw - amazon interviews have included 50% focus on Leadership principles are 1,3,4,5,2
Doing leetcode and clearing interview is the reality..there’s no escape from leetcode if you need developer job from good tech company..still there are many companies hire without leetcode but they don’t pay that well..
I don't agree with these characterizations of leetcode questions. Questions of medium difficulty really *can* be solved by a moderately intelligent person in 30 minutes, even if they can't recall any similar problem. Maybe not the most optimal solution, but only a fraction of the most difficult algorithm interview questions are stoppers to someone who hasn't seen the problem before. If you have to memorize solutions you probably are too dumb for the position.
Yeah. But what you just said: the solution will not be optimal And they may miss an edge case. These days you’ll get denied if you do a suboptimal or miss an edge case.
Uber's interviews only have 1 leetcode style question, the rest are architecture, hiring manager, live coding, and bar raiser.
What kind of questions do bar raisers ask?
Anything they like
The problem with taking leetcode too seriously instead of using it to weed out bad candidates is that quickly your labor pool will optimize along the axis of leetcode performance instead of being good at actual work. In the real world you can look things up in the internet, think about things for more than ten minutes before you start coding, use preexisting libraries instead of implementing a binary tree, etc. I thought it was a bit unfair that my performance on an hour test was basically getting me an offer with no other questions asked. But I win under this scenario so I hardly complained.
I met some people who were good at taking about problems, looking up things on stackoverflow and adding dependencies to a shitload of useless libraries. There were not good at doing real work either...
Unfortunately there's no easy way to find good developers. It fundamentally requires a lot of work and a lot of observing their work product. A lot of the current fads are basically just iq testing combined with a heap of fortune telling. One interesting approach I saw was to have a lot of comp tied up in bonus and to just hire people quickly without a super drawn out process. If they turned out to be bad, you could let them go. If they were decent, you could keep them on and not bonus them. If they were superstars you bonus them and option them to stay around. There were all the typical problems with assessing performance, but that seems to be a huge problem everywhere.
Sounds like you might be interested in a leadership track. The reality is industry wants machines that can push code. There is no higher purpose