Say NO to leetcode

Netflix
noLeetcode

Go to company page Netflix

noLeetcode
Oct 27, 2020 192 Comments

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!

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TOP 192 Comments
  • 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.
    Oct 27, 2020 5
    • Google
      recsys

      Go to company page Google

      recsys
      Sure, it’s good to level the playing field so that you don’t need a prestigious degree.

      However, we end up hiring folks with education and experience who can LC all day, and are awful engineers. Often times we have candidates who’ve floated around the top 10 companies for 1.5 years each time. I imagine if you spend 1/3 of time studying leetcode, you’re not going to be better at the actual job.

      If we were to give one take home or ambiguous problem (not immediately solved by DFS or DP which aren’t going to be useful day to day), they would not be able to solve it. The actual job can’t be well studied for — isn’t that the point of having experience?
      Oct 30, 2020
    • Barclays PLC
      wjydhm

      Go to company page Barclays PLC

      PRE
      Hudson’s Bay Company, Aetion
      wjydhm
      when enough people say not it will break this stupid trend
      Oct 31, 2020
  • Amazon / Eng
    HackerRank

    Go to company page Amazon Eng

    HackerRank
    I agree with you. LC has not been a fair indicator of future performance in SWE.
    Oct 27, 2020 3
    • Amazon / Eng
      HackerRank

      Go to company page Amazon Eng

      HackerRank
      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.
      Oct 27, 2020
    • ARM
      AJyf46

      Go to company page ARM

      AJyf46
      The fact that interviews are commoditised would imply that SWE are also commoditised heavily. If they have you on a generic conveyor belt on the way in you are on a conveyor belt in your tenure at the company. You keep the spaghetti working and network yourself into management or you burn out and get replaced with the next victim.
      Oct 28, 2020
  • This is like law students saying 'say NO to the LSATs', or med students saying 'say NO to the MCATs'.

    It's an aptitude test, not fully standardized but same rules for everyone. There's hundreds of thousands of Software Engineers out there who all want the few high-paying jobs, they need to be weeded out somehow; and engineers are expensive, you don't want them spending a ton of time reviewing the nuances of the interviews they gave because everything is system design and past experience based now; giving and reviewing a LeetCode interview is pretty quick and easy, and pretty Black and White whether someone passes or not.
    Oct 28, 2020 6
    • Adobe
      carps

      Go to company page Adobe

      carps
      Disagree
      Nov 3, 2020
    • Birst
      arhQ68

      Birst

      arhQ68
      If you want to test my aptitude, ask high school quant problems, or some other standardized IQ test. Its not an aptitude test if you have to grind something for months and expectation is to have a perfect working algorithm right on the spot.
      May 19, 2021
  • Stripe
    qcPz01

    Go to company page Stripe

    qcPz01
    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.
    Oct 27, 2020 4
    • WorldRemit
      HenryXIII

      WorldRemit

      HenryXIII
      Loved my Stripe interview, can back OP up
      Oct 28, 2020
    • Airbnb
      openthetable

      Go to company page Airbnb

      openthetable
      I agree that the format of Stripe's interview is new, but it requires good interviewers to conduct them. Last time I interviewed with Stripe, one of the engineer was very distracted and unprofessional. He simply said, hey, here is the question, you can read it by yourself and started organizing his closet. So rude.
      Oct 30, 2020
  • Red Hat
    C. Leclerc

    Go to company page Red Hat

    C. Leclerc
    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.
    Oct 27, 2020 4
    • Yeah, take home tests can be highly asymmetric in terms of time spent by candidate and employer.

      What I like to see when I interview now is what drives the candidate. Knowing a lot of trivia isn't what I look for, but recognizing patterns in code they haven't seen before, implementing a simple-ish algorithm while discussing trade-offs for different use cases shows their seniority, and how relatable they are. Life is too short to have brilliant but toxic coworkers lol
      Oct 27, 2020
    • Birst
      arhQ68

      Birst

      arhQ68
      If I were to choose between take home and leetcode, I will choose take home in a blink.

      Its a lot of efforts but not as inconvenient as going through the leetcode practice cycle.
      May 19, 2021