Comment by Dirak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dirak | Hacker News Reader

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Contrarian opinion, but I wouldn't want to work with anyone who couldn't pass a technical screening, and I wouldn't trust any architect who couldn't implement their own designs. Wrangling APIs and knowing which technologies are hot right now don't make a senior software engineer (emphasis on engineer). Maybe at certain companies it does, but if you're building any sort of product you need to be able to DFS and BFS and sort and map from muscle memory.

So I don't understand why people think there's a disconnect between Leetcode problems and day to day work. Even in web development, the fundamental skills that Leetcode tests for come up daily. Something as simple as manipulating the DOM, for instance, requires that you know about tree data- structures and algorithms.

Technical screening is purely a waste of time if you are not sitting right there with the applicant watching them write the code. (How do you know they wrote the code, otherwise?)

And if you are sitting there watching them write the code, it's still a waste of time. An applicant's relative level of skill can be ascertained in five minutes of talking with them instead of 30-60 minutes of watching them write FizzBuzz or something equally useless.

Hiring in literally every other engineering discipline works this way. New hires include a 90-day probation period just in case someone can talk the talk but can't walk the walk. Good software shops function similarly.

I agree. I have noticed there are a lot of people who really struggle when they are put out of their comfort zones of X framework in Y language working on mostly the same or similar code bases.

There are lots of companies that just need a guy who knows Spring design patterns or something, and they shouldn’t be giving tough algorithmic challenges, but at certain tech companies paying highly for people to work on very diverse sets of problems, many of which are technically complicated, it makes complete sense to prefer people with very strong fundamentals.

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