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Comment by sbilstein | Hacker News Reader

This. What happens in a coding interview is incredibly well documented at this point. If you can't be bothered to prepare, study, and brush up coding skills for interviews, I do not want to hire you. I tend to ask medium difficulty questions because I am looking for 1) ability to reason through a problem and 2) professionalism and motivation for a career.

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The point of an interview is to evaluate a candidate's fit for a particular role. This reads to me like the evaluation criteria is whether the candidate prepared for interviews or not. I don't understand this worldview at all, and I've been a hiring manager at both startups and FAANG. What's also well documented is that studying Leetcode is about keeping a warm cache of solutions to common problems at interview time, and much less to do with reasoning through problems.

> I tend to ask medium difficulty questions because I am looking for 1) ability to reason through a problem and 2) professionalism and motivation for a career.

Congrats! You are selecting for people who 1) rote problems for interviews and 2) motivation to clear your interview.

"What happens in a coding interview is incredibly well documented at this point."

Indeed. And so much so that a whole industry has sprung up to teach people how to play the game. Pretend you've never heard the problem before despite having learned to solve it via Hackerrank or Leetcode. Ask lots of "clarifying questions" to the interviewer to show them how "you" think. Then in a feigned stroke of intuition produce the optimal solution on the whiteboard.

>"If you can't be bothered to prepare, study, and brush up coding skills for interviews, I do not want to hire you."

"coding skills for interviews"? As opposed to coding skills required for the actual role your company needs to fill? It never occurs to you that good candidates might be too busy making deadlines to spend their nights and weekends working through LeetCode problems? This is why hiring is broken.

An ex-collegue was into hacker rank style things. I saw him doing one and pointed out that it's the sort of stuff he will never use on the job. A lot of the stuff he builds is overengineered and he is more interested in producing clever code than maintainable code.

> If you can't be bothered to prepare, study, and brush up coding skills for interviews, I do not want to hire you.

If you can't be bothered to hire people, earn a profit, and not turn traitor on everyone, I do not want to bail you or your failing bank out.

Next market crash, burn m*f*er burn.

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