[timr]

We had algorithm questions, but they weren't absurd. Whereas you'll routinely run into leetcode "hard" questions in interviews now -- which should be a dead giveaway that the candidate has memorized the answer -- back then you'd maybe get one question that peaked out at about medium. That's about the practical limit for a competent (but exceptional) mortal who hasn't simply memorized a book of trivia.

(And yes, we did these on whiteboards.)

It wasn't that long ago that Joel Spolsky proposed fizzbuzz as an interview screen...and he really meant that you should ask that question. The idea was that you demonstrate that you can write code using a simple test, then move on to more important factors. Can you imagine such a thing today?

[Aurornis]

> Whereas you'll routinely run into leetcode "hard" questions in interviews now

Where are you seeing LC hard questions? I’m in a fairly big Slack where people have been comparing notes on interviews for years. The number of people who actually get LC hard problems is extremely small.

A lot of people will claim they got LC hards immediately after an interview when they couldn’t solve them, but when you ask them to describe the question and someone looks it up, it’s always a medium.

There were also sites where people could report recent LC problems they received from specific companies. Hard questions rarely made the list of commonly asked questions.

The only exception seems to be people interviewing at certain companies in India for some reason.

[timr]

I personally hit them the last time I interviewed for IC jobs, which was around 2017.

In fact, I had a rather hilarious circuit where one interview hit me with a leetcode hard that I couldn't solve, and I worked out the answer when I got home. Later, I went to another interview that asked me the same question. They thought I was a genius.

I remember a fad that year was asking questions about doing depth-first search in 2D tensors. Once you learned that core trick well (mainly about handling the boundary conditions and traversals without messy code, which takes practice), about 80% of interview questions opened up to you. It was crazy how many companies were asking variations on that core question. So you'd do a few interviews naïve, bomb them, figure out the answers for the fads of the day, and be well-prepared by about your 3rd or 4th go-round.

Idiocy, all of it. Even leetcode medium is too much to be pushing for a correct answer in an interview [1]. It's Kabuki theater for engineers, where the interviewee is pretending not to have memorized the answer, the interviewer is pretending that the interviewee hasn't memorized the answer, and everyone is pretending that this is a "signal" that matters.

[1] Assuming that they haven't seen the question, of course. I will say that a question of that difficulty level can be useful to push someone to their limits for other reasons. But these days, it's mostly just a pass/fail screen, and you do the leetcode medium perfectly while tapdancing backwards, or you don't move to the next round.

[spacemadness]

Or interviewers pretending they could answer the question. The great absurdity is that interviewers find a problem, work it out for themselves with unlimited time or just find the answer, then ask it expecting someone to answer it cold. It’s a complete farce. If the world was fair, and we actually thought these problems were useful, you’d be able to turn around and ask the interviewer an equally hard question and expect them to solve it to know you’re working with quality people. Chances are they would fail.

[Aurornis]

> last time I interviewed for IC jobs, which was around 2017.

2017 was a long time ago in industry terms. The FizzBuzz article came out in 2007, your interviews were 10 years after that, and we’re now 7 years after that.

Things have changed a lot. It’s rare to encounter actual LC Hard problems in most interview loops. Most of the reports of LC Hards turn out to be Mediums upon closer examination. The current trend is for people to call anything a “hard” if they couldn’t get it, not necessarily because it came from an LC hard problem.

[timr]

I didn't quit working in tech in 2017. People are still using them -- I still see and hear interview questions -- I'm just not the one being interviewed.

I don't know how "rare" it is across an entire industry...but then again, no one does. You're asserting something you cannot possibly know.

> 2017 was a long time ago in industry terms.

Oh, stop it.

[jghn]

"Where are you seeing LC hard questions?"

I realize this isn't quite your point but the GP also brought ups that not too many years ago fizz buzz was the literal test. There's a pretty big jump from fizz buzz to leetcode hard. In face *any* leetcode is a jump up.

While not quite the same issue one thing I've found is I want to see more LOC from candidates. And a lot of the algo questions don't lent themselves to that. What I really want to see are their habits, style, and preferences.

[ditsuke]

A number of new grad loops in the EU had hards this year. Companies starting with U, M, etc.

[porridgeraisin]

Yeah, here in India people love choosing leetcode hards for when they come to a college and everyone in the college applies to them. Considering how big colleges are here, they just care about the filter rate of the test. Leetcode hards filter the candidate set down to a size that they can realistically interview, and so they continue choosing that. Mediums sometimes let through too many people.

In normal hiring, i.e linkedin, or even college hiring where they look at resumes first, this nonsense rarely happens.

[david38]

This is awful. It weeds out the people who are creative and love to code in favor of those who will memorize answers to get into a certain company.

[jfrbfbreudh]

woops

[jghn]

It'd be better all around to tell them they were extremely rude and that's why they're being declined.

[vsuperpower2021]

The comment you're replying to is almost certainly a power fantasy and not actual behavior from an interviewer. Basically, someone I had power over was rude to me, and I got revenge with a relevant programmer story.

[jasonpeacock]

I use a fizzbuzz-level question in my phonescreens for all levels of SDEs, and about 1/2 fail to solve it (from a wide range of experience, I've given up trying to predict who will fail).

The other 1/2 quickly solve it and we move on to better stuff.

[muzani]

Yeah, similar. If you're experienced enough, fizzbuzz is just so trivial enough that you can do it before the application. Hell, just tell them to copy paste the answer. Someone inadvertently pastes the wrong programming language for it too, which suggests they're either not reading the question or not comfortable with the language they're interviewing for.

[tayo42]

ive gotten fizzbuzz or some variation that's a play on the companies name a few times. i usually interview for like sre/devops type jobs though.