I have 7yoe as Software Engineer and I currently work as Senior Software Engineer. Besides that, I always been decent with math. Got A/A- in maths classes without much effort. Got national rank(All India Rank) within 100 in engineering entrance exams. However, I never really liked leetcoding. I see it as huge waste of my time and energy. The code we produce there is useless for real world. I always feel my limited life time is better spent contributing to an open source project or making something cool rather than wasting weeks and even months of my time writing code which is inherently useless. I am still doing fine in my engineer career. Solving complex problems is fun and whenever I need to understand some specific algorithm to solve a specific problem, I quickly learn it. So, I never really did leet code and still have almost no motivation to do it. If anything, I might just do it because of FOMO on TC. And from other posts, I guess a lot of you are on the same boat. What I don't understand is why are interviewers so adamant about leet code style interviews? And why do you personally ask leet code style interview questions? I think we all agree that they don't really test engineering skills. #tech #interview #leetcode #fang #faang
It's an IQ test.
Our field is vast there is so much stuff to know, just think about how much stuff you Google even though you might be an expert. If you remove leetcode you will have to prepare more not less, companies will have to ask knowledge based questions. Every company will be different. The randomness in results will increase, at least right now you know what you did wrong at some level. We can't assume the replacement for LC will be more practical
I hate leetcode too.
Leetcode is good interview style
I think the problem here isn’t leetcode itself but rather scaling of an interview process. We probably shouldn’t be discussing why a leetcode style interview is bad or rather not reflective of a person abilities, but what are the alternatives to a leetcode style interview and how that would scale
It’s not perfect, but that’s the one that scales, can be standardized and gives you best signal when you conduct hundreds or thousands of interviews every month. Small companies who hire a few times a year and only conduct a few dozen interviews, yeah leetcode is kinda stupid because they can spend more time per candidate and get better signal with other methods. But that’s what works for big tech. Plus... knowing how to traverse a binary tree is not rocket science tbh.
I like Leetcode. Atleast you have a style to follow. It's better than not knowing what to expect in an interview. There's also a machine coding round that some companies follow. That makes way more sense.
Its a standard that you can study and follow otherwise there is so many things to study/prepare.
What works for you doesn't work for someone else. I could argue that that the same Math classes you got A's in was really difficult for someone who finds LC relatively easier. And arguably both those things are only tangentially related to our actual jobs.
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say your company has 100k employees. thousands of engineers are interviewing candidates, and you want the interviews to be somewhat standardized and to be able to compare candidates against each other in a somewhat fair way. do you let your interviewers ask 1) creative engineering questions that are subjective, or 2) leetcode questions? true for all large tech companies. smaller companies might just be cargo culting.