Why do people ask leetcode hard for interviews? It makes no sense. You just have a feeling of dread when you’ve spent weeks prepping and your entire chance is over because you were just asked you a LC hard that is expected to be fully working in 30 min. It just reflects badly on the interviewer. Even some LC mediums can’t be solved without having seen them before! I’m convinced interviewers who ask hards just want to make the candidate suffer. For most people, you can’t solve most hards unless you’ve seen the problem before. Its just rude and demeaning to the candidate to have them sit there with no idea how to approach a LC hard. It’s ridiculous and hypocritical that interviewers expect you to solve hards on the fly when they couldn’t do so themselves. Especially when we’re working full time jobs and grinding Leetcode, which has nothing to do with the actual job. It’s stressful enough! No one has time to memorize obscure algorithms just for a chance of passing the interview.
There are some hards which have a solution you can build upto. So it is a good question to understand how the candidate thinks when presented with a hard to solve problem. Obviously since it is a hard problem, the expectations are lower and hints would be provided if the candidate takes the right path of thought.
It wouldn’t matter if they actually care about how you think and not just waiting for the solution
Stop applying to companies that ask hards, there are only a handful.
Targeting the big companies and I’ve gotten LC hards in phone screens and on sites. It’s stupid af.
Netflix, Fb and most teams at Apple do not ask DP based hard problems - those don’t tell jack sh$& about candidates problem solving skills - all they do is either a false negative or a signal that candidate did exact same problem earlier.
Cuz they are sadists and feel orgasm when interviewers are in pain.
You know this for a fact?
There’s nothing wrong with lc. The issue is it started getting gamed and industrialized with books, bootcamps, paid coaches etc. so lost all meaning as a metric for anything other than how much time and money the candidate spent prepping I’ve interviewed candidates who flew though lc and couldn’t do trivial things involving a real anything using the exact stack/lang they supposedly have 5+ yrs doing. Needs to be a mix to filter out lc monkeys.
In my opinion, asking algorithm questions are okay but expecting that candidates should come up with full working solutions with zero bugs makes no sense to me. They should make the decisions based on the thinking process of the candidates. But I think most of the companies are focused on getting a correct working solution with no bugs from candidates.
Yup. I just lost one this week. But hey, we continue.
I only have to ask my interviewees leetcode mediums. I ask Amazon refugees leetcode easies. I ask Amazon managers leetcode hards.
Dmed
Thank you
Careers in CS are now totally mainstream, and there are many qualified and highly motivated candidates. Given also the proliferation of interview prep resources available today, it’s not surprising that companies ask hard questions and have stringent hiring bars. The trouble with medium-level questions is that many candidates can rattle out the code for a solution right away, so you miss out on lots of useful signals to do with problem solving. When asking a hard-level question, it’s best to make it a somewhat collaborative session. You can identify lots of strengths and weaknesses that way, especially regarding problem solving and communication. I don’t think inexperienced interviewers should ask hard-level questions. It takes quite a lot of conversational skill and good judgment to conduct the collaborative discussions effectively.
I was just thinking the other day that the usual "Leetcode sucks, come let's rebel against the Man" posts started slowing down lately. Apparently not.
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Better ask: stop asking algorithmic questions period. They're irrelevant, patronizing, silly and waste everyone's time.
Alternatively, What should be asked?
Algorithm questions are annoying the way they're treated as nearly single source of truth, but they are pretty valuable and give valuable insight about the candidate. Imo, algorithm questions and pairing sessions should be combined into one. It should be a general coding question that does make use of algorithms. If not, maybe have both of these as separate sessions and also a system design session. Pairing session should also incorporate a culture aspect