[jnguyen64]

I think at 7 YOE, you’re at a very good spot where you have the flexibility of being picky with what types of interviews you can choose to interact with. Especially in this current market where it’s one of the rare times that candidates have some semblance of power in the hiring process.

You should check out https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards, which is a list of companies that don’t use LeetCode in their interview process.

An issue I often ran into when using the repo myself was I’d find a company that sounded awesome, and then find that they didn’t have any open positions. I created nowhiteboard.org to act as a way to pull all the jobs from the companies listed on that repo (and other companies that I’ve manually found that don’t use LeetCode).

I think there’s a matter of education and shining a light on the companies that don’t use LeetCode as I feel that the prevailing notion in online communities is that companies only use LeetCode to interview. I’m obviously biased since I’m obsessively researching this, but I’ve read a good few comments online of engineers who’ve stated that they haven’t had to use LeetCode for any of their interviews over their career, and that all of those companies aren’t listed on the repo above.

If companies had a good way to source candidates that are hesitant to jump jobs specifically because of LeetCode, I could see our industry starting to make some semblance of progress towards making LeetCode less prevalent in interviews.

Anyways, rant over, hope your job searching goes well!

[TurboHaskal]

YMMV I guess. Based on experience, I'll take leetcode or a whiteboard interview over wasting a weekend doing another one of those take away projects.

Any mention of these gets a hard NO early on during the interview process.

[civilized]

I'm really pissed about take-home projects now. I put so much effort into one, I passed it, I hit the interview loop, I got very positive feedback on my tech skills ("top tier"). But they ultimately pass. Five days later I get one sentence of extremely vague, useless feedback about my soft skills. That's representative of the entire process, which had numerous long delays and cancellations of meetings.

It's really insulting to put so much effort into something and then get treated this way.

[Cd00d]

I too am very tired of home tests.

Recently: * burned 2 days PTO putting together a comprehensive solution I was proud of. Feedback was they wanted me more proficient in their specific tech stack. I'd already said I was looking to learn their preferred language on the job and would do the test in a language I was more comfortable with, and they had been happy with that line of discussion.

* was given an open ended dataset and told to spend 2 hours on it. Did all the initial analysis I do on any new dataset in my regular day to day job, spending a little more than the allotted time, and found some interesting things. Feedback was that I should have gone deeper in my analysis.

[civilized]

> Recently: burned 2 days PTO putting together a comprehensive solution I was proud of. Feedback was they wanted me more proficient in their specific tech stack. I'd already said I was looking to learn their preferred language on the job and would do the test in a language I was more comfortable with, and they had been happy with that line of discussion.

Ugh, gross. You dodged a bullet. Pathetic.

I really despise it when compulsively agreeable people agree to something without actually meaning it, just because they're uncomfortable with saying no, and then backtrack later.

If any of you out there do this, please stop now. It's a huge waste of time for the people who interact with you, and it's hurting your reputation.

> was given an open ended dataset and told to spend 2 hours on it. Did all the initial analysis I do on any new dataset in my regular day to day job, spending a little more than the allotted time, and found some interesting things. Feedback was that I should have gone deeper in my analysis.

Yeah, it's obvious that this "don't spend more than X hours" is just HR babble to make the process look fair. They want you to spend a week and pretend it took 2 hours.

[jnguyen64]

Surprisingly, I don’t think I completely disagree with your point of view.

I think if I had the power, I would allow candidates to have multiple ways to interview at a company. Some companies do this already where the tech assessment portion can be administered as a take-home, LeetCode challenge, or re-factoring some sort of code.

There are downsides to LeetCode, and there are downsides to take-home projects. My intention with the website is to offer extra choices to developers when choosing to interview at companies.

And I think as a candidate (and companies as well,) LeetCode is the more scalable of the interviews since there’s defined criteria to study and to test on, so I do see the merits of your POV!

I’m not necessarily about this full-on hatred for LeetCode, BUT I also did buy fuckLeetCode.com just in case

[whiskyant]

Yup, would much rather do a 30 minute phone screen than a "2 hour" take home (usually more like 4 hours with all the requirements needed for the project, unless you already have a decent framework you're working off of).

[milofeynman]

I did one of these recently, and they basically looked at it, said it was great, and and made me do ANOTHER leetcode interview!