Say NO to leetcode
As a tech community, we need to stop entertaining these Leetcode quiz-based interviews, which are an insult to the actual tech experience that we gain across 10s of years of professional work. This practice completely undermines the real technical skills and has favored a fixed set of "good at memorizing solutions and/or performing quiz settings" people. It's completely unfair for people with family and other responsibilities to expect expertise in Leetcode style quiz contest, especially at senior IC roles. So, I have started saying NO to any company that requires me to go through LC kinds of questions. And to my surprise, many companies have been accommodative (including Netflix). Each time a recruiter reaches out, I ask them to connect me to the hiring manager, and then I negotiate on not going through LC since I don't have time for this nonsense. Many Hiring Managers agreed and changed the loop only to have design and experience-based interviews. Except for these standardized test companies - Google, FB, Amazon etc. I would stick to my rule and not interview at these places. I anyway received higher offers from others. Cheers!
I have 20 years experience. In fact, I was very good when I was in college. Just because of these, last one month I brushed up and started attending interviews 😊. Just want to ride along.
Okay, you can do that, but don’t think for a second it’ll buck the trend of LC style interviews. The only thing it’ll change is you having fewer options to choose from for companies.
Fine with me.
Definitely LC helps to eliminate lot of crap. But it also eliminates lot of prospectives
Good luck!
I think it makes sense to eliminate leetcode for senior folks. AFAIK, most companies is trending towards this. Many staff engineer interviews now involves more designs and discussions than LC or programming.
Stripe was one my best interview experience. No Leetcode there too
I heard Stripe still did LC on their phone screen. Is that false, or did you negotiate with HM not to have them?
How do you negotiate no LC ?
By asking for no LC and not going through the process if they don’t accommodate that.
Do you feel like you have leverage to do that cuz you work at Netflix?
I’m with you, the only thing standing between me and my dream job is (was) leetcode. But for seniors there must still be some coding test though, like in practice live, not going over hld or design stuff, just not LC. The new test must be on lines of “if I were to evaluate Linus Torvalds ...” how do we go about it.
Yeah, one of the better interviews I had was when I first started my career. They made me build a simple web app in front of them - frontend, backend and data persistence layer. I was allowed to look up whatever I needed to, treat the interviewers as sounding boards or get advice from them, and take their help in debugging the program. After I was done, we discussed optimizations, reviewed patterns and talked about alternate solutions. It was 90 min and I somehow took nearly 2 hours and felt like I failed it. But they were looking for how I solved it, relatability, communication, code organization, not the outcome or time factor.
I like that, I just hate with passion these take home assignments that take 10+ hours and timed code challenges that are 2-4 hours. I earn like 100-150 bucks an hour, I don’t want them to take advantage of interviewees while they’re chilling over the weekend, just coz they are offering a job for now.
I’m with you on that. And even if companies cannot eliminate LC completely, I feel like one LC round during the entire process should be enough (whether it be during the phone technical round or on-site).
yes, Its unfair to lazy people who only want to rest on their past laurels. Imagine being a hiring manager, would you want to hire such a person ? A good SWE is one who can adapt to any situation.
I am not against having coding component in the interview. I prefer to have bug finding, integration and other project level coding than those LC questions with zero relevance to the real world. You also don’t want people who are only good at writing one function with ~50 lines
Well you have only 30-45 mins of actual coding time. This is time you use to understand the problem, come up with a initial solution, revise it to come up with a optimal solution in time and space, code it, fix any bugs/corner cases etc Some companies do not one but two problems in this time. I think LC's are perfect for such situations. They are not too domain specific, test knowledge of all the common language tools all SWEs should know. Besides there is always 1 to 2 System design rounds for Senior folks. I don't see whats wrong with this.
I agree with you. LC has not been a fair indicator of future performance in SWE.
Is that one of the many reasons why there is so much PiP at Amazon ?
Absolutely! I’ve seen people not have the technical capacity for some of the work assigned to them. My friend is in Performance Advertising and he said that a lot of the new hires are not able to keep up with the heavy backend and ML workload even though they had ML experience on their resume. I’m sure these lads just grinded LC for a few months without being good software engineers. They will either get PIP’d or have to transfer teams/roles.