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Comment by posharma | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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:

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

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.

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