Comment by rhelz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rhelz | Hacker News Reader

Do you have grey hair? If so, you are screwed. Recruiters and hiring managers will not interpret you as taking a principled stance against leet coding. They will simply conclude you are too old to be able to do leet coding.

As far as having two kids goes---yeah, that's exactly the point of leet coding tests. If you don't have the time or energy to waste on mastering pointless exercises, you won't have time and energy to work 60-80 hour weeks. They want to filter out people with adult responsibilities, and adult problems.

Basically, are they going to hire one of you--experienced enough that you can recognize bullshit and so you will be continually pushing back--or two new college grads, single, no social life, and eager to do whatever it takes to make their mark on the world?

Alas, if you want a job coding at a company like facebook, google, bloomberg, etc etc you simply are going to have to be crackerjack at puzzle solving and leet-coding. Think of it more like hazing week at a college fraternity rather than as a test for how good of a coder you are.

Personally, I think it's ridiculous. If somebody has been programming since the Reagan administration at companies like Microsoft and AMD and Facebook, they will do fine wherever they are hired. But it is what it is.

>As far as having two kids goes---yeah, that's exactly the point of leet coding tests. If you don't have the time or energy to waste on mastering pointless exercises, you won't have time and energy to work 60-80 hour weeks. They want to filter out people with adult responsibilities, and adult problems.

One thing I have been suspicious of with these tests is exactly this... it is effectively an age discrimination loophole. Having free time to practice riddles is a decent proxy for how young you are.

My parents used to put me in after school education programs where they crammed memorization and "finding the trick" type problems. I'm not knocking that sort of thing, because it gave me a pretty solid problem solving kit, but most of this stuff is not at all relevant to any SWE job I've held. However, most people who are in tech companies are like me and are familiar with trick questions and memorization. So, that's how they test other people.

I think its useful to find the rare candidate who is both strong at algorithms and problem solving in general while being able to explain and talk like a professional.

Most of the time you get some "rock-wall" type who can crank out LeetCode but is awful to actually work with, or you get someone who is "toxic positive" and also awful to work with because they suck at the actual work.

So again, just gotta optimize for the sort of team you want to build. And most jobs where they ask these type of questions are offering high TC, so its not exactly unfair.

Like I mentioned elsewhere, I've worked at a company where people asked LC type questions and I chose to ask more domain related questions where I mixed in the algorithmic challenges. One thing I noticed is that we'd usually ask 2 questions each round so when ppl asked LC questions usually either the candidate failed quickly by getting KO'd at the 1st question, or they answered both flawlessly. Isn't that kind of concerning? So I'd start with the LC and then ask my domain focused algorithmic question, and notice that usually I'd get the KO/nerd on 1st question, but people might struggle on 2nd question I asked.

So idk. Long story short I prefer to work with people who can think and aren't rock-wall types.

> If somebody has been programming since the Reagan administration at companies like Microsoft and AMD and Facebook, they will do fine wherever they are hired.

Not true in my experience. I've worked with many seasoned greybeards who were incredibly mediocre, horrifically bad even. Guys with very impressive resumes, too.

I don't know if it's all fields, or if programming is special, but you really can't trust YoE or a resume. You have to ask people to in some way demonstrate - leetcode or otherwise - that they can actually do the thing.

And again, in my experience, many - a sickeningly large amount - simply cannot do the thing. Even when the thing is something like "reverse a string".

> many - a sickeningly large amount

How many are we talking about here? How many years of experience did they have?

I'm getting to be a greybeard myself, I can't keep count of the awful people I've interviewed or worked with. I'm talking about people who are now in their 60s, with resumes that would make your eyes pop out. ex-SGI, ex-NASA, earlyish (late 80s) Apple/Microsoft guys.

Point being, people get hired and hang around in the industry for all kinds of weird reasons, you never know what someone can really do until you test them.

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