Mr Pichai ban LeetCode questions at Google!
Apr 24, 2021
580 Comments
The suit will follow to all copy cat like companies like fb, Amazon will stop asking it too and it will help people with personal lives and families not grind leetcode if they want to work for you.
#banLeetCodeInterviews
comments
Folks are okay grinding weeks if not months for the job, but a take home that takes some hours over the weekend is apparently too much time to invest for a job?
Took me like 15 mins to understand what he wanted, as I asked more questions I was more confused 🤪
I maintain that being able to solve LC kind of problem is part of the requirements (and of course not the only one).
So the problem is bad interviewer, the question is how to better train the interviewer rather than complaining about LC kind of questions (and yes I'm sure there are some bad questions on LC, but that doesn't invalidate the kind of questions in general, which are just pure cs fundamental knowledge that should be required as part of the job).
All the proposition for interview i have seen so far have exactly the same flaw, take-home project? They will be on some website and you won't even have to memorize them 😅. System design? They will be on Internet and you can't prevent an interviewer to be looking for a specific design. Domain knowledge? It favors those who can BS you with some nice talk, etc.
I think interview should cover as much as possible as the required skills, that includes LC, but also system design, debugging skills, domain specific knowledge, ...
The fact that they will ask you hard LC questions ( graphs, trees etc) which you have to had solved before and know the implementation beforehand otherwise there is no way you can come up with the solution in 1 hour. Which is the memorization part.
FAANG interviews have unreasonable high standards for these interviews im not against them , because of the huge talent pool they need an elimination mechanism.
But tbh knowing that much LC isnt really gonna benefit you in the software career. Since at that level, with the time constraint and lack of documentation, you are basically doing competitive programming.
Hence im against LC interviews because they require a lot of practice and separate preparation. It is not something you do day to day as an SWE.