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Comment by yolo69420 | Hacker News Reader

this post is way too optimistic. you're implying the people making the decision that leetcode tests are used are competent enough to know they suck but still use them for the soft-factors you mention. I would bet essentially all of my money that instead they're simply incompetent and actually think these tests are good at testing ability.

that being said, everybody talks about like leetcode tests for a week straight is the norm. I've recently been through the whole thing with several big tech companies and some smaller companies, and all of them only used them for the phone screen.

in fact with microsoft for various reasons they skipped my phone screen and I went straight to onsite, and there was no leetcoding involved at all. still some whiteboard coding, but rather about highly specialized problems relevant to my field, none of this algorithm puzzle bullshit.

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I can boil this incompetence you describe down even further: employers and their employees don’t want to spend time making their own interview challenges.

It’s actually pretty hard and time consuming to come up with a mock scenario and evaluate it, especially when you also have your regular work to do.

Leetcode is seen as good enough and all the effort is on the interviewee. The current employees don’t see the pain and suckage. They already have a job and it’s not their problem.

> It’s actually pretty hard and time consuming to come up with a mock scenario and evaluate it

That's a hard problem for some startup, not for FAANGs. They could do hundreds of those and keep switching them quite easily.

Some FAANGS do this. Amazon has/had their own code evaluation system along with a live proctored exercise.

I think most companies are looking for the path of least resistance.

May be that’s where the problem is. Interviewing skills should be part of the responsibility. There could be a committee that can set and evaluate the process and questions. However, this will hurt the ego of a typical engineer so much. No one likes to be told what questions they can ask. Everyone likes to believe they are good interviewers, it’s just that they “hate interviewing”.

>>I would bet essentially all of my money that instead they're simply incompetent and actually think these tests are good at testing ability.

Probably the same people who think JIRA is a great project management tool :>) - when in fact, it (JIRA/Leetcode) gets used a lot, because it gets used a lot by other people - and for no other good reason.

Agree, from my experience this is largely a factor of requesting developers not used to interviewing to suddenly have an interview, often with little guidance either from their manager or hiring team. With nothing else, they have to rely on their own experience on how they were interviewed, with leet code, and so they continue the cycle.

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