[colesantiago]

This is brilliant and necessary, Leetcode needs to die and a means to an end in the age of AI.

For our business we don't use Leetcode, the future looks something like paid bounties and in person interviews.

tinycorp from George Hotz does the very same thing of paid bounties to get hired there.

The highly talented people will do this for fun, while those who aren't will self select themselves out.

(0) https://tinygrad.org/#worktiny

[williamdclt]

> The highly talented people will do this for fun

No?

People who have time AND enjoy doing this sort of thing in their free time will do this for fun. That’s the self-selection, then from this pool talent hopefully gets translated into results.

Why reduce your pool to “free time and enjoy doing bounties in free time”? That’s excluding many talented people. I’ll also point out that it’s discriminatory: single childless wealthy men tend to have a whole lot more free time (for example women do most of the unpaid care work in all countries, leaving a whole lot less time for this sort of thing).

I also have a suspicion (not based on any data) that people who enjoy doing bounties in their free time certainly tend to be technically talented, but also tend to have non-technical weaknesses around communication and other soft skills. So you’d self select for this weakness too.

[poincaredisk]

>Leetcode needs to die and a means to an end in the age of AI.

This is just, like, your opinion. Your future employer may think otherwise, and look for people with algorithmic skills. "But leetcode is actually evil" is just your rationalisation of your cheating.

[agubelu]

Leetcode interviews only became popular because FAANG needed a somewhat objective way to weed out large quantities of applicants in an initial round. In this context, and as part of a broader interview process, it somewhat makes sense.

But then of course, since FAANG did it, everyone else jumped on the leetcode bandwagon and started asking ridiculous DSA-exam-type questions that had nothing to do with their actual work, even if they had the capacity to conduct proper interviews for their candidate volumes.

[nsonha]

The majority of this industry thinks leetcode is shit. It's some skill for sure, just not such an important skill that it becomes the de facto key test for software engineers.

[colesantiago]

Who said leetcode was "evil"?

I am an employer and would much rather have in person interviews than leetcode.

It doesn't test for anything that AI can do already if not faster otherwise.

[KaiserPro]

leetcode is a bastard. I fucking hate it with a passion.

Its almost useless as a way to learn how to be a better coder, as most of the "fastest" answers are unreadable.

But if you are using it as a basis for interviews, you are more likely to bump into someone who has trained on that particular question.

I'm not sure what the answer is, as other said, pair programming is kinda the answer. Maybe debugging something in your code base.

[poincaredisk]

I guess my experience with different, because I never had to grind leetcode. I had some basic algorithmic lesson at my University (and a short adventure with competitive coding) but that's all. I never had a technical interviews where that was a problem - either there was no typical coding question, or a simple sanity check exercise. Instead we discussed some problems and thinks related to the job. I understand my experience is not typical - partially maybe I'm currently in the field of it security - but that still doesn't justify participating in the broken process with tools like this. If a company hiring process is broken just... walk away? Let them burn with leetcode grinders with no real experience that they'll finally hire.

[KaiserPro]

I think because google et al started doing coding tests like this, everyone else does.

[gabrieledarrigo]

> This is just, like, your opinion

No, also mine.

[the_real_cher]

I like leetcode easys for job interviews because it shows you know how to actually code. Many applicants cant even do fizz buzz.

[colesantiago]

And now they can do fizz buzz with AI, Cursor, Copilot, etc.

If you want to filter out these candidates, bounties are the way here and in person interviews.

Leetcode can't help you here.

[otabdeveloper4]

> And now they can do fizz buzz with AI, Cursor, Copilot, etc.

No, they can't. These are the people who don't know the difference between a variable and a function call or what a module is. (90 percent of applicants.)

AI can't help them here. Even if they can copy-paste an AI response they still don't have the vocabulary to explain what they're copy-pasting even in most basic terms.

[colesantiago]

> No, they can't. These are the people who don't know the difference between a variable and a function call or what a module is. (90 percent of applicants.)

Yes they can and you don't know if they don't know that.

You can't stop them from doing this.

The only way to stop them is to do in person, bounties and asking about their real world experience.

[raverbashing]

Maybe an easy leetcode with a twist, also if you throw some LLM confusing text on the description I guarantee nobody will take it out before giving it to the LLM

But yeah last time anyone proposed me to do fizzbuzz I had to be very polite and tell them not to take a hike

[the_real_cher]

Are you unable to do fizz buzz?

[raverbashing]

If you are hiring me for my ability to do code don't offend my intelligence by proposing something like 'fizz-buzz'

[the_real_cher]

I wouldn't want someone in my code base vibe coding features with AI, who doesn't know how to do fizz buzz.