Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

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> I don't live in the US, but if I did I would grind all the leetcode (as insulting as I find them) for one single reason: I don't want to work forever.

I find it funny that the internet exaggerations have convinced non-US people that:

1. Doing a couple LeetCode problems is the only thing interviewers look for

2. Everyone here automatically gets a high paying FAANG-like job if they can memorize enough LeetCode problems

3. All of these jobs just write useless software all day and never really do anything productive

and

4. LeetCode problems are impossibly difficult and it’s a tragedy that anyone would be asked to code during a coding interview.

I struggle to read these threads any more because everything seems so stretched out of proportion from the real world. If your view of what US development or interviewing culture is like comes from HN threads, you’d probably be pleasantly surprised by what it’s actually like here most of the time. The weird catastrophizing that happens on HN and Reddit is hyperbole.

I haven't had a job interview without leetcode bullshit in about 15 years. And years before that.

Basically since Joel's posts in the early 2000s. He promoted a reasonable idea-that programmers should know how to program. Then B and C players rushed to make that happen! Similar to how agile became the complete opposite of what it meant originally.

I was an interviewer at [FAANG]. I did 300+ interviews. At the beginning I asked tough questions since I didn't know better, but I quickly realized I was not getting the signal I wanted. So I changed and just asked simple questions that included writing some code. There was no gotcha, no need to know sophisticated data structures. Leetcode practice would not have helped much.

As a counter-point, I've almost never had a job interview depend on leetcode-type problems in my ~20 years.

You may be focusing on the leetcode label, and not the rest of the fail-fast zingers that are ubiquitous. Only a subset are actual leetcode. The first mistake and you're done, due to the high number of applicants.

If you've got networking to let you bypass the BS, that's great. But most interviews (by number) are "cold" interviews that conduct these almost exclusively. Due to lack of trust and extreme fear of failure.

The only offer I've received in years was because, while they did this type of test as well, they didn't take the results too seriously. One out of maybe a hundred attempts that year.

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