Comment by quanto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quanto | Hacker News Reader

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On HN and elsewhere, there are so much deeply personalized emotions regarding LeetCode-style interviews. Instead of focusing on personal specifics, I am more curious about it from a social and systemic perspective.

1. If LeetCode problems are not only irrelevant, but actually turning away good employees, why aren't more companies shunning LeetCode problems? Tech is a very competitive field, and in the current climate of low interest rate, we (at least in the West) have more money than talent available. An employer with non-LeetCode interviews would have a significant market advantage. Is Google (and Netflix) being completely stupid even with their rigorous introspective take on hiring? If LeetCode is terrible for both the employer and the employee, why is it so popular? Are we all cargo-culting?

2. What is a better solution? How do we know it's better? There are proposed solutions, here and elsewhere, that make the candidates feel better about themselves, but for employers interested in hiring technically competent engineers, what is the solution? Requiring everyone to have a popular git repository?

> why aren't more companies shunning LeetCode problems

Because its easier than talking to candidates and because many companies emulate FAANG, regardless of wheter that makes sense or not. If I am that big a deal, I NEED a system to filter, because I will always have a surplus of applicants, no matter what the market looks like. If I am a small company, or even a medium sized shop that has difficulty filling positions anyway, then doing the same doesn't make sense.

Not because my standards are lower, but the amount of applications I get are. Same as I don't build a webservices architecture to handle 10E6 req./h when it will serve less than a 1000, it doesn't make sense to apply methods designed for "hiring at scale" if I am not operating at that scale.

> What is a better solution?

Checking credentials, talking to people, about their past work, about how they would tackle example problems in the real world, their view on solutions.

aka. doing actual interviews instead of taking the easy route and just reading a puzzle question from a sheet of paper and waiting behind them with a stopwatch.

If I want competent people, I need to do competent hiring.

> 1. If LeetCode problems are not only irrelevant, but actually turning away good employees, why aren't more companies shunning LeetCode problems?

At the margin, most companies (probably close to 100% for many sectors) do not make money from code quality. I'd argue it's actually pretty far from the margin for most companies. See the overwhelming shittiness of almost every software product that's been around for more than a couple of years. Almost all products get worse over time but still some companies make more money. IP and market position are much more important. I think this can also explain why so many very successful companies never launch a successful second product: they didn't initially succeed because they're so much better at development than everyone else, they succeeded because of the serendipity of the initial product.

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