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Let's talk about the elephant in the room: LeetCode. Yes, that platform where many of us spent countless hours grinding away, solving algorithmic puzzles and DS to prep for those intimidating tech interviews. Now, don't get me wrong, LeetCode has its merits. It helps sharpen problem-solving skills and familiarizes us with the types of questions asked in tech interviews. But the thing is, being great at Leetcoding doesn't always make you a great software engineer. Before the chaos of COVID, I had just learned about Leetcode, and it was the go-to for interview prep, and still is today. It pretty much became our holy platform for aspiring big tech engineers including myself. We would grind, and it was fun sometimes, but mainly was mentally draining. Big tech companies are notorious for their grueling interview process and relied heavily on LeetCode-style questions. But here I feel lies the problem. The focus shifted away from cultivating genuine engineering talent to mastering interview techniques. Many brilliant engineers slipped through the cracks because they didn't excel at solving algorithm puzzles under pressure. And conversely, many folks aced the interviews but struggled to apply their skills effectively on the job. The loophole in the interview process allowed individuals to shine in interviews while lacking the practical skills necessary for the job. I can't stop wondering if Leetcode could have played a role in these big tech layoffs the past few years. Whether Covid happened or not, Leetcode is always King.
Shut up. This is filtering criteria. Do it and score high TC. Shop whining
Leetcode does great for entry-level roles. When the stuff from your university lectures is still fresh in your head. It sucks when hiring for senior roles.
I was interviewing a candidate once pre covid and picked up my pen and gave it to him and said "sell me this pen". They looked shocked and flustered, after a 30 second pause I took the pen back and gave them a leetcode easy. They bombed it and I sent them on their way. Its fun to throw them off and see how their brain recovers. Had a good laugh about that one with the team later.
"First I'm going to need you to sell me on this interview technique of yours. Convince me that you're not wasting my time."
I hope the companies that emphasize these tests are doing internal assessment on them. For example, looking at a score on interview performance versus 1 year performance review. I have a feeling it is like GRE, where correlation with actual performance is not great.
You could easily do a "Here's some code with a bug in it. Show me how you figure it out." Would be 100x more realistic while not even being a take home test
I’m personally excited for leetcode to die lol. Companies like Stripe and Chime had the best coding interviews I’ve done, they’re much more practical and focus on building extendable “dummy” systems, no algo tricks that rely on having seen the problem before. Leetcode makes it so you need a separate skillset for interviewing that will likely never be used in your job. Such a waste of time that could be better spent improving your practical engineering skills. Interviewing might be harder than the actual job 🤷♂️
Are you new? Interviews have been asking these questions for decades
What's the alternative People complain about take home project - they are trying to make you do free work !! Java trivia - all it test is memorization and no problem solving brain teasers - even worse than leetcode, remember google used to ask how many window question?
Technical questions related to the actual job. If you're doing generic hiring or don't even know what the people are going to be doing when you've hired them then you need to go back and think about how you run your sh!tty business
Domain knowledge, live debugging, solution architecture, and code analysis are just a few of the ways.