[andrewingram]

There's an assumption you're making that these challenges only filter out a small amount of qualified candidates. I suspect the percentage is actually quite significant. In my experience it's usually bigger "looks good on a resume" companies that do these challenges, which suggests they're getting enough candidates in the funnel to be able to afford turning away a lot of more-than-qualified applicants.

I've failed more than my fair share of these challenges, but never (being subjective here) because I wasn't actually capable of (1) solving the problem or (2) doing the job. My take here is that I _may_ have been unqualified for these roles, but that the interview failed to actually uncover it, due to spending all the available time on low signal exercises.

[wiseowise]

> There's an assumption you're making that these challenges only filter out a small amount of qualified candidates. I suspect the percentage is actually quite significant.

Statistically that’s irrelevant, as they optimize for “do not let through rotten apple”, rather than “find good apple”.

[ep103]

Which is horseshit. I'm currently working at my first bigco company, and I would consider the MAJORITY of people they have hired in the last year to be horrifically bad hires, because they have optimized for new hires that can leetcode, but can't actually code.

We just fired a person on my team who didn't understand pass by value vs pass by reference, or how to debug in an ide, but she could manipulate strings in leetcode!

[nonameiguess]

That assumption isn't being made at all. That's why it says with sufficient throughput of candidates. If you need to hire 100 people, have 10,000 candidates, 1,000 of whom are qualified, and a 90% false negative rate, you'll get the 100 true positives you need, while leaving 900 well-qualified people pissed off. The process is bad for most of the candidates, but works fine for the company doing the hiring.

The problem comes when smaller companies that don't have the same high rate of new applicants use the same process and then complain they can't find anyone.

[andrewingram]

> "Their ability to filter out 'those who can't code' in an efficient manor while sacrificing a small amount"

This is the assumption I was referring to, that the "sacrifice" is small. It's suggesting that the false-negative rate for LeetCode challenges is small, and I'd argue it's actually quite high -- as you also suggest (your rate is 90%).

[wtetzner]

You might be right, but I don’t think that particular assumption being wrong necessarily matters.

[quickthrower2]

Big companies also have the headache of standardizing across thousands of interviews. That said you can do that more with practical exercises (build this thing…) than leetcode

[Kranar]

Any hiring process will necessarily filter out a large percentage of qualified candidates so it's not a major concern. If I'm hiring for X positions, and there are X + Y qualified candidates, then any hiring process whatsoever will necessarily have to filter out at a minimum Y candidates, and usually Y will be much much greater than X.

The problem is that the total number of candidates who apply for the position, Z, is significantly higher than X + Y by a very very large margin, and I mean orders and orders of magnitude. For every position I post I get on the order of 600-1000 applicants in a matter of a week, even though I'm only looking to hire maybe 2-3 people. Of those 1000 applicants, 80% of them are simply unqualified, and that's being really really generous just for the sake of argument (I'd wager the figure is closer to 90-95%). So once again just for the sake of argument that means 200 of them are qualified, and I'm hiring three, which means any process I choose whatsoever will filter out a minimum of 197 out of the 200 qualified people, no matter what I do.

Given that calculus, it's better for me to focus on making sure that I filter out the 800 people who are simply unqualified for the position even if that means I end up filtering some of the 200 good developers, because I have no choice but to filter out at least 197 of the good developers anyways no matter what, whereas I do have a choice about filtering out the 800 bad ones.