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Comment by DanielVZ | Hacker News Reader

I used to do tech screening in my previous job and not only it measured stress, it was awfully biased against older people. We lost so many senior people that I really wished I could work with because they weren’t used to jumping through the hoops and loops of leet code questions (in my country leetcoding is fairly new). Then there were other younger candidates that were pretty mid but knew all the answers to leet code and design questions and ended up getting the job.

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Was that not perhaps an intentional outcome (not sure how high up you were there)? Younger people are cheaper etc

If you're using existing leetcode questions that may speak to the amount of effort your company is putting into the interview process...

I mean there’s a limit to the kind of leet code easy questions you can make. At some point they are all pretty similar. This was also the tech screening, after that there were other interview rounds with harder stuff, but in the end it was so frustrating to see qualified candidates being rejected due to easy leet code interviews.

I tried to push back against the criteria we used for screening but it was hard to convince upper management that the method that FAANG used for screening wasn’t working.

Exactly. Leetcode only measures how much leetcode the candidate has been practicing. Nothing else.

I don't really think that's accurate. In my last interview cycle, I aced the livecoding portion at each interview and didn't practice any leetcode problems at all. In my normal workflow I write utility scripts in Python using only the standard library pretty regularly. If you know how to write complete, small programs using only the standard library of some language, you'll do fine on livecoding interviews. A lot of people struggle to do this because they only know how to work inside of a framework.

But then again they could still force you to use another language (as I had to during my interviews) and even though strict syntax isn’t required it still throws the candidate off.

Maybe they didn't give you the same sets of problems most companies use.

Last time I went through any of these one of the problems was implementing a priority queue, for which I would have to write a min-heap on the spot. There's no chance I'd be able to do it on 45 minutes with an interviewer breathing down my neck.

In other situations I had easier ones. I don't remember the problems especifically but I recall one I googled after the interview and the answer was using two-pointers fast/slow to iterate through a list. I spent maybe 20 minutes tryng a couple different approaches and that one never occurred to me. Last time I had to use a two-pointer solution for a problem was at uni, which I left 15 years ago.

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