[sotix]

It’s hard to extrapolate to the whole market, but I can provide my personal experience. I was laid off, and my unemployment benefits have stopped, so finding a job is a bit more desperate for me than it has been in the past.

Now I’m dealing with algorithms technical interviews, but they don’t mesh well with my style of problem solving at all. I like to quietly think on a problem by myself first. If it’s an exceptionally difficult problem, I’ll probably take a walk or the answer might come to me in the shower. If I’m working with someone else, a more collaborative process where we’re both trying to solve the problem and bouncing ideas back-and-fort is my style. Solving the problem in 30 minutes in front of a judge under the context of needing to land a job as soon as possible doesn’t properly test my abilities as a software engineer at all.

Yesterday, I was asked a leetcode hard in an interview from some no name start up. I answered how to theoretically solve it out loud with the interviewer but ran out of time implementing it. I got the impression the interviewer thought I was unprepared and a clueless engineer. I was rejected 15 minutes after the interview.

Overall, I’m not encountering interviews that actually let me display my competency. The interviews seem to all be tailored for a specific type of problem solver (fast in high-pressure test-taking environments) while eliminating every other type of person. I think it’s easy for the interviewer to lose context on the nerves the candidate might be experiencing.

The accounting industry doesn’t do this. If someone has a CPA license, companies trust that credential. If someone doesn’t have a CPA but has experience in Big 4 public accounting, companies trust that experience. If someone lacks those signals, companies may ask more technical questions. But they start from a basis of trust based on clear signals.

Unlike my accounting background where my past experience was based on trust, I have open source projects that can actually be reviewed. Some reviewers have gone through them yet still want to perform an algorithmic interview. Most have not. I feel that the vast majority of interviewers don’t really know how to interview in a more holistic manner.

[cutemonster]

When you say "a LeetCode hard", is that because the problem is literally on the LeetCode website, among the hard ones?

Or is it similar to LeetCode problems, although not actually on their website?

Does everyone remember all question titles by heart and that's why they say it was Leetcode questions, or is it more figuratively speaking :-)

I hope you'll find a place with an interview process that works for you.

[solarmist]

If you've done a fair amount of leetcode problems you can recognize them and feel their levels. Then afterwards you can search and confirm your expectations.

It is not uncommon to have either verbatim or lightly modified leetcode problems as technical challenges for interviews. I think Facebook now makes it standard you need to be able to solve 2 leetcode medium questions in a 45 minute interview.

[cutemonster]

Interesting, thanks! Good that at least this is apparently pretty well known, so everyone has a chance to prepare

[sotix]

It was a difficult problem, and I was genuinely interested in the solution. So I searched online after the interview and found that leetcode called it a hard problem.

[cutemonster]

Wow, so that problem was from the LeetCode website itself?

Was it with different parameters or different phrasing, ... Or everything was the same?

If same but different, I wonder how (un)likely it is that they came up with that problem themselves, independently, without knowing about the LeetCode version. (What would you think?)

(Nice that you found it anyway)