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Comment by rainyMammoth | Hacker News Reader

The issue with LeetCode style interview is that almost EVERYONE can solve those questions after studying a couple weeks/months.

The only thing that LeetCode questions predict is if the candidate has been training for LeetCode questions.

The fact that Google, Facebook etc still use it as a gatekeeping mechanism makes me believe they want to find cogs that will specifically spend hours studying for it. Making sure that those engineers will be ready to execute their mindless coding tasks at the company.

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Right but in some ways this is what they need. Someone who can stare at computer science material, that is probably boring, for long periods of time. Someone who has a good memory for details, can remember routines. Can "solve" problems that have been solved before by applying theory. Someone who is willing to follow the rules and go through the process.

I think you made a logical somersault. Leetcode doesn't imply any of those, neither good memory for details or that you can "solve" problems that have been solved before by applying theory.

You missed the whole point of the OP's post it seems. The only thing that leetcode implies is that you can solve leetcode tasks.

Leetcode implies all of those, and just like in mathematics competitions, being able to solve these problems implies a high level of ability.

Nope

Remembering the solution to a problem isn't the same as solving it. Testing if people can regurgitate solutions is at best pointless.

Alot of people cant do it. If facebook is paying 450k to developers who can regurgitate leetcode I'm willing to bet theres some signal there. Its a pretty big assertion to claim the opposite

The reason companies like Google can and do it is because their funnel of incoming candidates is large enough that they can decide to choose the 'intersection' of many factors combined. Meaning they will filter down to people who trained for LeetCode questions AND they are also otherwise skilled.

Take home assignments can be automated the same way as leetcode tasks actually. So there must be something else to it.

I think people underestimate human nature in this case. It's a known thing that many interviewers just do the interviews for the sake of feeling superior than someone else.

It was another trend in the industry to ask stupid brainteasers like "Estimate how many gas stations there are in Manhattan" until Google banned the whole thing altogether. Google judged that these questions only serve to make the interviewer feel clever and self-satisfied. [0]

It's time to do the same with whiteboard interviews.

[0] https://www.wired.com/2015/04/hire-like-google/

Maybe I am just extremely dumb, but the "hard" questions are actually very hard for me. The medium questions sure.

Nah, some LC hards are extremely hard. Most FAANG interviews don't use hards

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