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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comments
The only thing it’ll change is you having fewer options to choose from for companies.
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?
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.
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.
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
Its a lot of efforts but not as inconvenient as going through the leetcode practice cycle.