[neilv]

As soon as you get away from what the interview prep books cover, it's usually pretty easy to tell if someone in your own field is experienced and at least competent, just by talking with them.

(Leetcode seems to be an awful predictor of how someone will perform as a software engineer. That students are spending so much time practicing for it, rather than experimenting and building things, is awful. Some of the biggest companies they're applying to were founded by students doing the opposite of practicing for someone else's hazing rituals -- they were experimenting and building.)

[wildrhythms]

I genuinely believe a 15 minute back and forth between an engineer and an interviewee will give a better signal for hiring than any hours+ long Leetcode 'assignment'.

[midenginedcoupe]

I used to interview like this, until I hired the wrong person. They talked elequently about how to program, but just weren't very good at digging in to technical details of an existing codebase and understanding what was actually going on.

So I added an hour's pair programming on either toy problems or our existing codebase, depending what was suitable at the time. No leetcode, no months of prep for candidates, and our interview outcomes were much better.

There's a massive gulf between toxic leetcode hoop-jumping and a friendly chat.

[mianos]

While this may be true, it takes more than just engineering skill for this to work in a predictable manner. Often an engineering interviewer takes their ego into the process and it becomes a competitive game or an opportunity to show how smart they are.

I 100% agree with you but it's not as easy and scaleable as it seems.

[neilv]

Agreed, interviewer ego slipping in can be a problem.

Interviewer training can help avoid that happening accidentally.

(And Leetcode interviews don't avoid the interviewer ego problem. It's purportedly "objective", but the interviewer can easily taint it, accidentally or intentionally. The answer isn't Leetcode, but to train or reign in egos, and then you can use a real conversation.)

[sureglymop]

Leetcode also encourages people to 'roll their own' algorithms and cryptography. Even though most languages have standard libraries which cover all of it already.