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by throwaway-dos 1451 days ago
I totally agree.

But I find the whole discussion not strange but rather dishonest. I realize I'm biased towards thinking that the blog posts condemning some special sort of interviewing come from the "losers", the people that didn't get the job. That isn't true in general, but there is still this aura of entitlement: "I am a good programmer! I have other skills than leetcode! I demand an interview process that is tailored to my specific skills!"

I don't believe the claims that the current style of interviews is not working. This claim usually is made in the blog posts and in the interview horror stories, but I haven't seen it any of the FAANGs I worked in. Sure, some questions give more signal than others, but that's the company's problem, not the candidate's. If anything, large companies realize that lack of diversity is a larger problem and are trying to combat that directly (not with changing the hiring process for the general case though).

What it feels like is the blog posts try to solve a different problem ("how can I get a FAANG job") under the disguise of making the world a better place. Meanwhile, companies try to solve a completely different problem altogether ("how do we weed out candidates that might not be a good fit for what we value at scale with low latency?").

As a hiring manager, I'm interested in applicants that are (among others) good at leetcode-style questions without having had to train a lot on leetcode: Technical problems that are not easy to understand (cognitive and communication abilities), have a simple and easy trivial solution (higher level view on problems and customer orientation) and have high technical depth at scale (specific technical knowledge). So that's where the post is right: don't spend so much time on leetcode. But also don't try to change how companies interview. It's unbecoming.

2 comments

Lol almost all Leetcode is memorized, most of the algorithms developed tool years for researchers to understand, someone isn’t going to figure it out in 45 minutes without having seen it before
I guess it is strange to me, as you usually only hear about bad stories. So I was expecting it to be much worse.

I agree, as long as companies evaluate candidates by a combination of different tests, this should be the best for everybody.

Two companies for which I went through the whole interview process had 5-7 different interviews, and only one of them was leetcode-style problem. So even if somebody fails at leetcode problem they should excel at something else.