[Swizec]

That’s because at FAANG those problems are already solved. And there’s a team of experts working on each of them. Maybe multiple teams.

Your job is to be a clever code monkey. The Process will take care of turning your coding into engineering.

Leetcode interviews are great at testing for just that. A high IQ willing to solve arbitrary puzzles just because someone said “solve this”

[sushshshsh]

Even at my mid tier company we have processes around the crucial but (to me) boring parts of the software industry, which involve building, deployment, version control, access control, connection drivers, requirements gathering, provisioning of resources, maintenance...

The list goes on and on and if someone doesn't do any of these things, the whole operation will grind to a halt. And absolutely none of these procedures involve reversing a linked list or traversing a binary tree inorder (maybe git does but that's an implementation detail hidden from me ^.^)

[username90]

But people are taught the basic boring skills required to deliver value in a big org in the first few months and very few fail to learn them in that time, they are by far the easiest skills to teach in software development so it doesn't make much sense to test it when hiring.

[Swizec]

Correct. And as far as I can tell, devops folks don’t do leetcode interviews. Most SREs don’t either.

At my last interview process (in June) I was being hired into a more seasoned role where experience matters more than code chops. There was an algorithms question but the biggest weight was put on the “Can you design a distributed microservice infrastructure with good tradeoffs and solid relational modeling”

Series A company so it’s conceivable that I’ll be involved in all parts of the stack.

If I just did well on algorithms (I didn’t) and nothing else, it would be a hard no hire. But they were very impressed when I said “Eh for this load, you don’t need horizontal scaling except for redundancy”