[willio58]

> Let us know if you’ve seen the problem previously

Or just say “I’ve seen this one before” until they get to one you actually have seen before and ace it.

Leetcode is a joke. I’ve hired a dozen or so high quality candidates using a short 2-3 hour take-home. It shows us more than leetcode ever could. And sometimes people take it places I could have never imagined, these are people we move quickly on and they are the highest performers in the org.

[MichaelNolan]

> using a short 2-3 hour take-home

Where in the process did you give the take home project? As a candidate, I would consider doing a take home project as the final round of an interview, but anything earlier than that and I will reject doing one. 2-3 hours is too much time to spend on one company, unless you’re confident that the company is serious about hiring.

Projects can work great for smaller companies, but are basically impossible to use at larger companies.

[willio58]

We do 3 rounds.

1 quick culture fit one, basically do they even like what our company does? Do they say anything offensive? If not, they continue on.

Then a 2-3 hour take home (this is self-limited on their end). Once it comes back we give a 45 minute technical round that’s focused on really high level questions about technical knowledge and about their take home specifically.

If both of those go well, they go onto the final where we ask work-background questions. Basically trying to understand how they did in recent jobs. Finally if we’re feeling good we call some references for like 2-3 minutes each and unless something comes up (you’d be surprised how often something does) they get an offer!

I think you’re right about the small/big company thing. The candidate needs to have confidence that their take-home will actually be evaluated. This can be helped by guaranteeing an interview round after the take home is done but even still I get the point that this would be hard to trust in larger companies.

[novok]

people would usually ask for what the 'trick' is and you won't be able to give the correct answer if you lie like that

[wakawaka28]

A lot of the kinds of questions you'd want to skip have no trick. Also, presumably, if the question is to be swapped then they will not demand a full answer before doing the swap.

I think it's stupid to try to judge if someone has seen the question before. The only time it's wrong to have seen the question before is if someone tipped you off to that specific company's questions. I think that most people are not good enough at writing reasonable questions to attempt it. For that matter they are not good at picking reasonable questions for an interview out of a collection of problems either. People often choose problems that are excessively difficult, ambiguous, or even impossible to answer.

[novok]

You still need to be able to give a few sentence summary of the solution, trick or not and you will need to be able to give an answer that actually matches if you are going to say "ive seen this question before, [implying you know how to solve it]" while you actually have not and are lying.

It doesn't matter if it is 'stupid', or 'wrong', or whatever other cope you want to invent, people will do it and if your caught in a lie because you do not even know the answer to that, you've disqualified yourself immediately and potentially get blackballed as a liar.

If I've caught such an immediate lie as an interviewer, I'd be a bit relieved on some level because I now have a legit excuse to end the interview series early and go do something else and save my coworkers from doing interviews, because for most interviewers, they are chores.

[wakawaka28]

>You still need to be able to give a few sentence summary of the solution, trick or not and you will need to be able to give an answer that actually matches if you are going to say "ive seen this question before, [implying you know how to solve it]" while you actually have not and are lying.

You would probably fail in an interview with me because you assume things that simply not stated. If someone says "I have seen this before" that does not imply that they know how to solve it. They might have seen the question and decided it was not worth their time, or they didn't actually solve it, or whatever. You CANNOT infer that they are lying if they follow up with "I don't know (or remember) how I (or anyone else) solved it." People have fallible memory. In a high pressure situation anyone can get mixed up, misread the question, etc. So, don't be a jerk.

>It doesn't matter if it is 'stupid', or 'wrong', or whatever other cope you want to invent, people will do it and if your caught in a lie because you do not even know the answer to that, you've disqualified yourself immediately and potentially get blackballed as a liar.

It's so trivially easy to get disqualified, that's stupid. If they really push you, you can say "Yeah I think I saw it a long time ago and I don't remember the solution. You decide if you want to switch." And that is probably the truth in most cases anyway. If someone would disqualify me over that then they're not my kind of people.

As for whether it is a "cope" to observe that these questions are counterproductive and pushed by a lot of smug and incompetent copycats, I think it is worthwhile for one's own sanity to recognize that solving leetcode questions is a separate non-work-related skill. Being good at those questions does not make you a good engineer, and vice versa. Yet, in some cases, your future may be decided by these pseudo-academic timed exercises, judged harshly by baboons.

>If I've caught such an immediate lie as an interviewer, I'd be a bit relieved on some level because I now have a legit excuse to end the interview series early and go do something else and save my coworkers from doing interviews, because for most interviewers, they are chores.

I think what you're really saying here is that you would rather hire a good liar over a non-liar, assuming they have equal leetcode skills. Because that's what you are selecting for if you don't allow people to comfortably say "I've seen it before and I don't recall the answer right now."