| I'm currently interviewing for a mix of tech lead and equivalent staff engineering roles that more "individual contributor" focused The ones that skew towards heads down work ask a lot of LC questions (the kind cheated on in the article). These are that you can find the exact solution for in the time it takes you to read the question out loud for the interviewer... - Meanwhile ones that skew towards leadership are asking questions that you can't cheat nearly as easily on. Having in-depth conversations with technically knowledgeable people, sure you could maybe you could get some sort of teleprompter, but the breadth and depth of knowledge being asked means you'd be hard pressed to keep up if you didn't already know the domain pretty well. There's also a greater focus on talking about yourself, like things you've done for example. Now you can borrow someone's story, but again, it's many many times harder to deliver it convincingly than it is to deliver a LC answer that has a known optimal solution that you're already expected to follow near verbatim. - The difference is simple, the amount of resources you're willing to put into testing. Places asking LC questions are doing so as a cheap filter. Places assigning a high ranking engineer to talk to you are making an investment. I understand the dilemma a few companies in tech face, like FAANG. There's so much demand they can't afford that in-depth approach for everyone. But I do see a problem with how systemic the cheap filter approach has gotten. So many companies hurting for applications in the pipeline are putting up silly hoops that ironically seem to favor people who aren't that technically experienced. I mean who's going to do better on a LC Hard with dynamic programming, the person who's spending 8 hours a day at work writing code, mentoring, doing code reviews, meeting stakeholders, etc... or the fresh grad who spends 8 hours a day running through your company's question list on LC? I recently saw a post on Blind about a company dealing with a bad hire... they hired a CS PhD as a Senior dev only to find they were executing at the level of a Junior. Want to venture a guess as to how they managed that? |