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Comment by ldjkfkdsjnv | Hacker News Reader

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ldjkfkdsjnv

Before people start complaining about leetcode and how it doesnt exemplify skills:

its a proxy for a combination of:

intelligence and how hard you are willing to study

the computer science knowledge shown is just a bonus

EDIT:

One last thing to throw in, its pretty clear that theres a correlation between the top software companies and how hard their leetcode interviews are. You can claim all you want it doesnt work, but facebook and google have very hard leetcode interviews and are known for the best software

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They are known for the highest paying salaries + providing stability relative to a high paying start-up. They aren't known for the 'best' software (how do you even quantify that) and Google specifically has a reputation for not maintaining software and letting products die. Generally not a hallmark of good software.

Also, the computer science shown asked in these questions is a very subset of computer science. I've never been asked an image processing question, non-trivial concurrency/parallelism, or numerical optimization questions (all things I've actually used in my job, I've never had to do strange linked list manipulations unfortunately). Those are all CS or CS adjacent but never get asked in my experience. I've also never been asked low level networking questions.

Instead it's just tricky graph questions and list/tree manipulation questions (that aren't that hard, but they are incredibly boring). CS is such a huge field, it's truly baffling that the technical interview questions at Google and Facebook are so miopic.

You've to be a genius to solve a "hard" unseen leetcode problem in 15 mins correctly. Facebook is notorious at expecting candidates to regurgitate solutions to problems in 15 mins. Intelligence plays a lesser role than exhaustive and painful practice which involves solving the same problem multiple times. It's a full-fledged examination that expects you to excel while being constantly watched and judged.

>It's a full-fledged examination that expects you to excel while being constantly watched and judged.

and interrupted, frequently, because that's also perfectly normal.

It's comical how this industry now thinks these arcane and often quite difficult DS&A interview question processes are reasonable and how it's been so normalized people just study this for weeks before applying to a new position, sacrificing evenings and weekends just for job mobility. These processes are not even proxies for intelligence anymore except maybe the very few people so wired they miraculously could jump through a handful of these with optimized solutions in 15 minutes without ever seeing and solving the problem before. I've worked with very intelligent people before who qualify as geniuses and they couldn't solve these problems under these conditions, especially not multiple of them without having at least seen the problem before.

Yeah but it's a "how much do you want this job?" test. Which is not necessarily crazy, if you want to retain people in the firm it makes some sense to have them feel they worked hard for it, plus that they might not get through the eyes of the needle next time.

Or even a "how hard do you throw yourself into overcoming hurdles" test, which would be more useful. Because the attraction of a job inversely correlates somewhat with your value to the company, since weaker applicants would be outperforming their ability in terms of pay.

Made an edit to my post:

exactly - the proof is in the eating of the pudding.

How do you know that Facebook and Google have best software because of the way they do their interviews?

At their size (number of employees, number of people who want to work there) they could probably just randomly pick (or add here any other way of selecting candidates) software engineers and still get some of the best in the market that will create amazing software. Not saying this is what is happening but I am just providing an alternative explanation to underline that the conclusion hard interview => best software needs more evidence to be true.

I think the way interviews are done is a function of:

- company culture (first and foremost)

- size (how big is the company and how many people they are hiring) and churn

- their believes about building software (some people believe math is required, some people think engineering is required, some people believe no pre-requisite is required)

- employer attraction: how much/how many people want to work there

- availability/support of employed engineers to be part of interview process

- how it started (usually big companies inherit the conception about interviews from their original founders as they where the ones hiring the Cs)

- the country culture where the C level and top management is located

The problem is that soon enough, all these mediocre and wannabe companies started copying the FAANG process, thinking: "If we interview like FAANG, we must be like FAANG. Or at least candidates will think we're like FAANG." And: "If your process rejects 99 percent of all applications, then that mean we're hiring the top 1 percent."

Which is basically how the LC craze got started.

Google and Facebook are known for the best software? They are known for "some" exceptional software; but most of Google stack is crap. Facebook we can hardly know but they rely heavily on buying startups.

> but facebook and google have very hard leetcode interviews and are known for the best software

...are they? whenever I go on facebook, I always have a slow, unresponsive, buggy experience just using the website, and that's on firefox with 32gb ram on a 10th gen core i7

The former only in case of the latter.

I.e., if someone isn't willing to grind leetcode, their intelligence is irrelevant.

If someone is willing to grind leetcode, then yes, their intelligence is a secondary variable.

Regardless, such styled interviews are intended to minimize the number of false positives (since the companies have so many applicants it's safer to err on the side of "no"; there are more in the pipeline), which means they will also generate a tremendously high number of false negatives.

I have also worked with many companies that are pretty huge, cash positive, exploding growth, and with very complex software as their product. They made a rule of not hiring using DS&A after accidentaly coming across a tier-3 college student with no knowledge of DSA and still doing pretty well (and he didn't jump ships too), so then changed their strategy to: only test them for what you need from them. I will give it to Google and FB that their technical scale is much much larger than that company, so they might demand engineers who can understand that.

> facebook and google have very hard leetcode interviews and are known for the best software

This has got to be a joke of some sorts. More like the worst software. Sure Google is super rich, they have unlimited engineers who produce a lot of code. Almost all Google products I used were crap, buggy, bloatware.

My Google Voice app lags for seconds... _seconds_... while typing out a text. It's insane.

It's a great way for second-raters to grind their stats instead of actually building something.

>second-raters to grind their stats

so sayeth the people on the outside of companies building the most complex software in the world.

Most of the engineers at those companies (and really all companies) don't work on those projects. Some people work on truly complex projects, but those people are a tiny fraction of the entire workforce. It wouldn't even make sense for a company to allocate people that way.

Also, I'd contest the statement that Google or Facebook works on the most complex software. They don't work in fintech, medical, hard real time that I know of (waymo does, but they've been spun out), and many many more fields of SW, HW and CS.

They work on hard stuff, but don't discount the complexity that other companies deal with.

i mean do you speak from experience or is this just more conjecture? what people on the outside fail to realize is that while individual projects might not seem complex (maybe frontend engineering on FB is less complex than pytorch) it's the scale of the systems you have to orchestrate that is incredibly complex.

That wasn't really a dig, but I should have said jr. devs instead of second-raters.

couch it however you want but you're deluded if you think your projects stack up against even a BS grad at FAANG if you're discounting their abilities just because they got in through grinding LC.

>You can claim all you want it doesnt work, but facebook and google have very hard leetcode interviews and are known for the best software

Really? Google APIs I've used have been 70% crud, 30% great. Facebook has been consistently good, eg PyTorch and React.

But really, mostly just of willingness to study.

And grind, grind, grind, grind, grind.

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