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Comment by abj | Hacker News Reader

What if we form a group/site that refuses to do leetcode interviews?

This seems like a classic coordination problem. If enough people refuse, companies will have their talent pool limited.

We could use this group to help match companies and developers who don't want to leetcode.

If it's true that leetcode filters out great developers, than companies who 'can't find talent' should be able to use our group to find some. In fact, it could be a great sign of how willing the company is to think against the current hiring zeitgeist.

Edit: Here's a quickly built site. say-no-to-leetcode.netlify.app

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You are describing a labor union.

I agree, I avoided using the word union.

In an ideal world, this would be a union.

In (what I worry might be) the real world, the word union conjures unhelpful barriers to action.

I'm less interested in fighting idealogical battles. I'm more interested in achieving a practical goal - getting a large group of people to say no to leetcode.

My guess is more people will say no to leetcode if they think of it as a general group anyone can join. This allows a larger amount of people to ignore idealogical barriers they might have to joining. So for now it's a "group/job board".

To be blunt, most of my observations of traditional unions have given me the impression that they prevent the hardest workers from advancing and protect mediocre workers who do the bare minimum. The incentives appear to create a negative work environment for those who do want to excel, even in traditional union careers such as teaching and nursing.

I agree with you that the trend of asking Leetcode (or any rote-learning) style problems hurts candidates. I have no moral problem with software engineers bargaining collectively to reverse a trend that is harmful to the industry.

That being said, I think there is a tendency for organizations created around a cause to find themselves rudderless when that cause is finally achieved. The urge to not disband and instead look for another cause is often too strong, even if they don't feel quite as strongly about the new cause.

I genuinely would like to know how traditional unions obtained their negative stigma. My guess is they were started with equally noble aims.

A union that disincentivizes leetcode problems will reduce the ability of candidates who are best at rote-memorization problems to advance while protecting the ones who are mediocre at rote-memorization problems.

In this case it happens that people who are good at rote-memorization problems probably aren't the best people to lead the industry. But the union doesn't exist to serve the industry, it exists to protect the people working in it.

In an ideal world the HR department would be considerate of every employee's needs and there would be no need for unions. But in practice the incentive structure of the HR department doesn't allow that, so you need a competing incentive structure to balance things out (the union). Neither can achieve the goal perfectly on their own.

> getting a large group of people to say no to leetcode.

I assume you mean LC to be a stand-in for the types of interviews that focus on LC-style questions? LC didn't invent these and they're certainly not to blame when companies ask senior SWE candidates to invert binary trees.

That's a great point - LC didn't invent binary tree questions. Leetcode might be the wrong term to use.

Is there another, more general term I could use? I'm looking for a term that would be as clear to as most people as possible.

I'm not aware of one. I've always said LC-style interviews.

I don't think LC is entirely useless, I've seen people graduate with CS degrees but couldn't do fizzbuzz. But the prominence of it for certain interviews is frustrating in many cases.

In the EU unions are not as tainted as in the US, but we still have neoliberals on the right, and 'progressives' on the left, both clamoring individualism for their own agendas.

There is no solidarity left : earlier this year my country ( NL ) threw all elderly under the bus ( we have no room for you on intensive care ).

You know what happened? They got scared. That was all.

I remember the 80ties : all unions would have united and the entire country would have revolted.

Many Unions in the US have a good standing (Teachers, Police, Nurses), some circles have been brainwashed by corporate propaganda that they are all horrible.

I'm fine with voluntary unions that don't want to take my money. I just don't want to be forced to pay up to a mafia 'protector' just to work in a position.

Where are the going to get the money to pay for lawyers and negotiators? Sure everyone wants something for free, but no one wants to pay for it.

How do you expect to establish/coordinate such a union without any funding?

In NL unions negotiate central contract terms for all employees in certain sectors. The unions are funded by their members, but the result is for everybody.

Why not just publicly collect the companies that are known to not ask applicants to "invert a binary tree"? This would generate an incentive for companies.

The data could be community-driven, but of course that risks sufficiently big players fudging the input data (sort of like the fake reviews on e.g. Amazon). Even so, it may be possible to detect which companies are faking it.

A list is good idea. Here's one of the main lists. https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

This site would basically be the same list - with the added goal of explicitly filtering employees and employers who want to hire this way.

You mean something like this?

https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

I used to be a recruiter. Roughly 1 in every 25 developer I worked with told me they wouldn't do silly arbitrary technical interviews and that if the company wanted them to they would decline the interview.

I respected that decision but it none of those engineers every got hired by companies I was working with. They all had jobs already so clearly that was fine with them but it seems like there needs to be a better alternative.

One developer would ask what the role entailed, then find a relevant job/project that showed he had done similar work. That was helpful but obviously only works if you have a longer career with many projects to pull from.

Leetcode also filters out bad developers. I’ve said this on HN many times before but I don’t actually want to work with people who can’t solve basic leetcode.

There are a lot of “experienced” engineers out there who don’t know how to tie their shoes once they’re out of their comfort zone. Try interviewing people, you’ll see.

> What if we form a group/site that refuses to do leetcode interviews?

Why does it need to be a group? Refuse to do them, explain why, and move on to the next company. Talented developers are in high demand. There are plenty of other opportunities.

Won't work because there's a giant incentive to defect and no way to effectively police it.

Does individual defection even matter? The purpose of this isn't to put pressure on job seekers, it's to put pressure on employers. The whole idea of "policing" the members seems strange to me.

If you're the type of job seeker who has no objection to leetcode, you wouldn't join. And if you're the type of employer who refuses to do anything else, this would be the last place you'd look for hiring.

The goal is to publicly show employers how many "refuseniks" there are. The situation right now is that refusal only happens privately and anecdotally.

You're right - individual defection doesn't matter. This is optional. The whole idea of "policing" the members seems strange to me and I agree doesn't need to be anywhere near this.

"If you're the type of job seeker who has no objection to leetcode, you wouldn't join. And if you're the type of employer who refuses to do anything else, this would be the last place you'd look for hiring."

This is very well said and exactly what I'm hoping for.

"The goal is to publicly show employers how many "refuseniks" there are. The situation right now is that refusal only happens privately and anecdotally."

This is exactly the goal and what I'm hoping to improve.

OP said the objective was to create a critical mass of people refusing so companies would have to adapt. That's what wouldn't work.

If it's just a niche job board then that's not an issue, but it also seems like one of those things that should have been done already, probably has been, and isn't popular for a reason.

There is already a large number of people who hate audition-style interviews. They don't want to defect.

A public group actually makes it easier for people to avoid defecting. It's very difficult for a job candidate to talk to employers about this when you're just some lone weirdo with idiosyncratic principles. It's much easier to have that discussion when there's a public group of people you can point to with the same principles. There's strength in numbers.

Consider it a kind of "Alcoholics Anonymous" for interviews. You wouldn't say that can't work because people defect. Yes, people defect and drink again, but they joined AA in order to avoid drinking, and the purpose of the group is to help them with the goal of not drinking. And also to remove the private shame of admitting a problem, by showing publicly that it's a very common problem. This is not a perfect analogy by any means, but the gist is similar.

Great point - there will be a giant incentive to defect. I'm not interested in policing it.

I'm interested in raising the incentive for people to say no.

I'd do this by offering another job board for people who aren't likely to leetcode anyway. I would tailor it to people with great open source projects/ experience that might get looked over in a more traditional interview.

I would give this at least a cursory glace. This is how SO careers was marketed to me back in the day (regardless of whether or not that was true) and it ended up landing me in an interview process that was not as terrible as it could have been.

I'm with you on this. That said, something like this is happening anyway it will just take a while to play out. If companies keep interviewing like this, it will keep on selecting in a certain way and basically exclude people who aren't willing or able to play this game. This will impact on the company's products in the long run but the problem will be hard to notice if the company sits on a lot of money still, until it doesn't.

You're right that it's happening anyway and will take a while to play out. I'm interested in hurrying that change along if possible. I'd also like to give the people who aren't willing or able to play it more of an alternative.

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