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Comment by mylons | Hacker News Reader

Leetcode interviews _are_ nonsense, but not even preparing for them as they’re the predominant format, is just showing a lack of preparation.

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> "is just showing a lack of preparation."

I think that puts a negative tone on people with other degrees than CS, even if they have good software experience, or are older with life commitments. Jobs and interviews in past did not ask this stuff, yet it's now implicitly considered prep. It's biased towards new CS grads and young folks.

Many/most? companies needing devs do not use/need these CS "fundamentals", which do not automatically correspond with tech skills needed to do product development, at least in SaaS world.

They are testing your ability to jump through arbitrary (and sometimes challenging) hoops.

which sounds similar to working on a large system, doesn't it?

Not really, no. At least nowhere I’ve worked. Currently I work at a company that recently went public and operates near FAANG scale. There are some interesting technical debt issues to overcome and these are challenging. But they’re not arbitrary or capricious. Most importantly they’re not correlated at all with our interview questions, which are designed to select people with recent exposure to mid- and upper-level textbook CS problems. That is, they’re going to naturally select from privileged groups (generally white and wealthy Asians who have attended top-tier universities).

I dont agree many of the word problems on Leetcode i.e simple and medium dont even need you to read a datastructure or algorithms book, what is required is some good logic and basic knowledge of a language. Then its just the way you approach the problems so they are actually very good problems and will definitely make you think better, clever and maybe just maybe make you a better programmer. It is more like solving math puzzles in school, no one can deny the usefullness of those math puzzles in making you think hard.

That's what I wondered about too.. OP knew about HN but hadn't picked up about how interviews apparently work at a lot of companies nowadays - the whole 'leetcode' stuff. Never had to deal with that, but heard plenty about it after just couple of weeks lurking on HN.

Ah well, probably goes to show that everybody picks different threads/posts to read

It also might show some professionalism and interest if the interviewee were to ask “what kind of interview can I expect such that I can best prepare?”

Exactly. Does anyone think that even "non-self-taught" programmers may remember off-hand "how to reverse a binary tree" ? Interviews require preparation. They may be terrible selecting interview questions, but neither that nor being "self-taught" are valid reasons to claim "you can avoid preparing this interview".

> not even preparing for them as they’re the predominant format, is just showing a lack of preparation.

Why would you spend six months preparing for them when you could build and launch an entirely new product in the same amount of time, which has a much higher expected value?

I don’t disagree. The author’s stated objective, though, was to find a job and went through this process willingly.

Does it have a higher expected value?

If you land the job, you have a guaranteed, pre-specified income. Probably a high one, depending on the company.

The massive risk of failure with launching a product should dramatically lower the expected value. Especially since most products, even if successful, won't pay as well as the corporate job.

The author had failed at launching two different products over the past few years, so it isn't a gimme at all.

You must be some incredible entrepreneur for that EV to be much higher. Strong leetcode skills print money with far less uncertainty than starting a company.

> as they’re the predominant format

Are they? I often read this on HN, but I'm starting to wonder if there's not a selection bias that's even bigger than I expected. Beyond the usual suspects, I've had more coding assignments for instance.

This is how you make it worse for the next person.

Life is too short to engage in nonsense unnecessarily.

I don’t disagree. You can choose to interview at places that do not perform these types of interviews.

I agree, but I don't think this is a place where it is fair to expect developers to "vote with their feet" and not participate in these interviews. The companies who do data structures and algorithms interviews seem to pay the highest in the industry

You have to pay a lot (+ a lot of perks) to get folks to tolerate the amount of bullshit you put up with at a FAANG.

There is a world of other more enjoyable and educational opportunities out there they must compete with. And so the cash shovel must be pulled out.

People vote with their feet, and then a new generation of fresh grads are lured by the pay to fill their role. They’ll grow sick of it in a few years, rinse and repeat.

Arguably you have a chance to change things from the inside once you’re in.

I know it’s not a good advice in general, but regarding recruiting in particular, it’s a more realistic proposition.

Social signaling is too important not to engage in "nonsense" on occasion. Geeks resist this, thinking that their special flavor of technical knowledge, which they alone possess, should transcend a million years of evolution that produced monkeysphere dynamics. The situation is laden with all manner of irony.

This is a straw man: choosing not to work for fools is not opting out of social signaling.

If you know how to program, you have lots of options.

> choosing not to work for fools is not opting out of social signaling.

That depends entirely on how you choose to define "fools".

Agreed. I am quite ok with being a "fool", if it means working for a FAANG tier company and collecting FAANG tier compensation.

I am not going to disadvantage myself by refusing to participate in this on some questionable principle. While I agree that Leetcode-style interviews are not the overall best, I am yet to come up with an alternative that addresses all those issues without introducing massive new ones. So it is a compromise. And as long as this compromise stands, I am fully intending on getting the most out of it.

Leetcode prep is still better than spending hours on a take home assignment where the work often doesn’t transfer to other interviews.

Personally I think 6 Leetcode interview loops is better than 6 take homes, but that’s just me.

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