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by thaumasiotes
1459 days ago
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I actually see a worse problem than that. The idea of the leetcode interview is that you give someone an extremely hard problem and hope they solve it in 30 minutes. But the problem is much too difficult for any nontrivial number of candidates to solve it themselves in 30 minutes, so the intent of the process is that the candidate draws the answer out of the interviewer, who has prepared it in advance. Then they're graded on how much help they appeared to need. But this grading is hopelessly contaminated by candidates' varying levels of charm and ability in cold reading. Cold reading isn't the skill companies want to test for, but it's the skill they actually are testing for. If you want to evaluate the candidates objectively, the goal would be to minimize interaction with the interviewer, not emphasize it. |
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> Cold reading is a set of techniques used by mentalists, psychics, fortune-tellers, and mediums. Without prior knowledge, a practiced cold-reader can quickly obtain a great deal of information by analyzing the person's body language, age, clothing or fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, level of education, manner of speech, place of origin, etc. during a line of questioning. Cold readings commonly employ high-probability guesses, quickly picking up on signals as to whether their guesses are in the right direction or not, then emphasizing and reinforcing chance connections and quickly moving on from missed guesses. Psychologists believe that this appears to work because of the Forer effect[1] and due to confirmation biases within people.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect