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by Distozion 1476 days ago
People who call for Leet Code either never tried to hire actually high skill developers or fools themselves into thinking that they're the cool kid in town. You might think it's better than any other alternative. I agree - it's been an amazing filter to filter out companies who are on average, quite crap to work for. From my personal experience, they are overburdened with process to a degree that even if they hired the best devs out there, they wouldn't be able to deliver anything because of all the red tape.

The best jobs I had to date, I met the person leading the company/project/team, we had a chat, talked what tech we like, dislike, how we'd structure a product, what are the preferences to the process around everything. And that's the key thing - it was always a discussion, no Q&A. The key is that the candidate is not the only one who needs to know his stuff - so does the lead.

As a side effect, all of those jobs were way above the market. Again, personal experience, but higher up you go - less BS like "we need leetcode to hire" you get. Unless you're Facebook and you have a genuine problem of too many qualified engineers constantly applying, you should aim to only disqualify truly hopeless cases.

The company can't hide behind process and expect great hires. Early in my career, in a small city I was working in (in return, in the dev community you know about what other devs are doing), our company denied so many devs that within a year or two were among the top performers, just because of the leaderships insistence of a take home tests, Q&A interviews and gotcha style questions...

So please - do continue using leetcode, it makes filtering your company out so much easier and I don't need to go through bullshit stages to know that the leadership has no balls to make the hard calls when it comes to hiring & firing.