Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by kilroy123 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

kilroy123

I got a new job about ~5 months ago and this was not my experience at all.

It was leetcoding questions for days. If you didn't ace it, you'd get ghosted quickly.

One place, I did 3 rounds of interviews, an all day take home assignment. I still got ghosted!

So I call BS on this quote as well.

View on HN

I fucking hate leetcode. It takes me about a month or two of practicing to get caught up and proficient with leetcode, but there's 2 issues with that. The first is that that is a lot of personal time and effort to invest to prepare for interviews. And second, my professional skill does not increase at all from practicing leetcode. Leetcode beyond the concepts of easy/medium questions is programming trivia and reflects rote memorization more than anything else. And worst of all, leetcode distracts from far more valuable skills like design patterns and how to properly architect and design software.

In the end, the only companies that should be doing leetcode beyond the easier level questions are companies with an insane number of applicants where they can afford to turn away a lot of good talent.

My experience is that this is wildly inconsistent between companies. I've worked for crappy companies for low pay that had ridiculous long multi-week interview processes, and good companies for much better pay where the interview was a single 30 minute phone call where they offered me the job.

Was this a FAANG or FAANG-like company where it's likely you'd have TC of $350K plus, or a sub-FAANG company where your TC would likely be in the $100-200K range?

Lol not at all. It was regular run of the mill startups and small companies. TC like ~$150k-180.

It's interesting to me. When the carrot is TC of $350K+++, sure, anyone is willing to jump through that grinder. But for ordinary run-of-the-mill companies, there are so many that _don't_ have a hazing-like hiring process, I don't know how the ones that do make it.

They don't. That is what the article is about.

> When the carrot is TC of $350K+++, sure, anyone is willing to jump through that grinder

Maybe the first time, but I'm well above that mark now and I'd sooner retire early or switch industries over studying leetcode again.

Same here, applied to a medium sized company and got the standard hackerrank garbage test totally unrelated to the position right off the bat. At least now I know who I don't want to work for.

I hate the leetcode stuf, especially for SRE positions. I much rather focus on the systems side of things that I will encounter on a day to day basis

Reply on news.ycombinator.com