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Comment by zamalek | Hacker News Reader

> leetcode

Please just don't. You're better than that. Here's a list of companies who don't participate in this bullshit: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

At my current gig I was hired at staff level in Nov. 190k (please, let's normalize sharing salaries) . I could do better, but I am passionate about my job for the first time in 10 years. How much do you value happiness?

You're not an imposter. Especially as an HN reader (you're actually interested in your job).

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The leetcode companies will pay $500K+ easy for a staff level engineer. A Senior engineer will easily pull $400K.

That’s over a 100% increase from your current rate.

I’d personally recommend practicing leet code, if that’s the thing holding you back… maybe 1 problem a day. By the time you actually decide to change companies, you wont be interview prepping just before an interview.

> 500k+

Oh yes, I know, and I am envious. My soul and mental health is worth more. Solving problems makes me feel alive. Parroting answers does not.

I was somewhat headhunted by UiPath. Huge money. Crazy salary. First round I had whiteboard problems with the most awesome engineer that there is. Absolutely aced that, the engineer missed a meeting over shooting shit about algorithms. Second and third leetcodes were engineers that were clearly running off known solutions, and couldn't rapport over best or alternative solutions. I absolutely made a fool of myself, and I'm really good at that stuff.

Leetcode encourages parrots, and I need to believe that I'm better than that. Arriving at the thesis of a doctorate of a tenured scholar in the heat of a 1.5hr interview is hardly a representation of how valuable an engineer is.

I am so glad I failed. I was kicking myself at the time for tolerating the bullshit (I had a gun/green card issues at my back), I knew that I should have walked away.

Or you can just suck it up for a bit and make hundreds of thousands of dollars. You have to give up a few months studying, not your soul.

Interviews tend to reflect culture: If your interviews are based on leetcode, then on at least some level you're being trained to associate "good at leetcode" with "good at this job."

I generally expect a leetcode interview to lead to either an environment where there's a lot of fires and putting out fires is the only high status thing (at which point maintenance and fundamentals get ignored - no one notices the service that didn't catch fire); or else you get a very snobbish environment where you're expected to memorize answers (at the expense of saying "I don't know" and spending a couple hours doing research)

(Some people are fine with this, of course, but I personally find it exhausting)

> Interviews tend to reflect culture: If your interviews are based on leetcode, then on at least some level you're being trained to associate

Yeah this isn’t true at all. Much of the leetcode paradigm exists because companies want to hire top tier talent, and they want to fill head count at significant scale to quickly ramp up new teams or entire organizations. There might be a better style, but this style has worked well enough for these companies to establish $1 trillion+ market caps, regardless of how you feel about it. And no one wants to risk moving off this because of how expensive it is to hire and fire.

Nope not true at all.

I've worked for some phenomenal companies that treat employees incredibly well and compensate them top of the market. They required some leetcode to get in but other than that, the culture was fantastic and the quality of my peers was/is top notch.

To me it seems like you just don't want to spend a few weeks prepping and you're coming up with reasons to justify it.

> To me it seems like you just don't want to spend a few weeks prepping and you're coming up with reasons to justify it.

I've obviously spent weeks prepping and passed leetcode interviews: otherwise I couldn't comment on the drawbacks I've seen working for such companies.

They really don’t. Interviews are just interviews. They don’t reflect culture even in the slightest. Almost all the companies I’ve worked at had leetcode interviews - and they all had different cultures.

In my current role I had to do an algorithm question. It would be an easier medium on leetcode. I wouldn’t describe the environment the way you have at all.

Ahh, we might be talking past each other: I wouldn't call a single medium-easy leetcode question a "leetcode interview" - I meant companies where that's the primary/only focus, not one part of a robust evaluation.

This feels really confused. You know the leetcode answers are just during the interview, right? Once you get the job, it's a job that involves solving real problems.

So you're telling me that an interview process that filters for rote knowledge yields candidates who who are, in general, not representative of that process?

I've always thought of work as a game. How do I uncover the rules to maximise earnings within boundaries that provide suitable enjoyment and acceptable levels of stress.

Spending a few months doing some leetcode revision to pass some interviews that could personally yields me hundreds of thousands, potentially millions, of dollars, is a very acceptable trade-off. Many people accept that because the risk/effort/reward ratio is very worthwhile.

I've worked in two FAANG companies and the level of talent and skills is phenomenal, an order of magnitude over anywhere else I've ever worked. They all played the game, and continue to play the game, and receive the rewards for doing so.

Choosing not to participate because you dislike the process isn't going to change the hiring process.

What's the point of interviewing someone if it has nothing to do with the job they're actually about to be hired for? That feels really confused to me.

It's a proxy for IQ + willingness to grind to learn a new skill, and those two attributes are highly cross-functional in an environment where job requirements frequently change.

> What's the point of interviewing someone if it has nothing to do with the job

Sounds like there are about 2-300,000 points …

You're literally asking this person to forgo potentially an extra quarter million dollars a year to avoid a couple dozen hours of study.

I tend to agree leetcode is not always reflecting fundamental skills. Some people just freeze even if they are good software engineers. I'm wondering how to assess the ability to write some code and decent problem-solving? What is your approach?

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