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Comment by gnfargbl | Hacker News Reader

You're right, but that just shows how fundamentally silly this interview approach is.

In any real engineering situation I can solve 100% of these problems. That's because I can get a cup of coffee, read some papers, look in a textbook, go for a walk somewhere green and think hard about it... and yes, use tooling like a constraint solver. Or an LLM, which knows all these algorithms off by heart!

In an interview, I could solve 0% of these problems, because my brain just doesn't work that way. Or at least, that's my expectation: I've never actually considered working somewhere that does leetcode interviews.

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I was told to use ANY language in an interview. I asked them if they were sure, so I solved it with J. They were not too pleased and asked me if I could use another language, so I did prolog and we moved on to the next question. Then the idiot had the audacity to say I should not use "J and Prolog" but any common known language. I asked if assembly was fine, and they said no. Perhaps python or javascript. I did the rest in python, needless to say I didn't get the job. :-)

You're a hero!

Reminds me of https://aphyr.com/posts/340-reversing-the-technical-intervie... (and the follow-ups to it)

We had a programming language class at college and wrote the same program in everything from Java to Lisp. The lisp was way nicer.

:-) I would have hired you!

That's not a job you want.

You fired them.

I haven't been asked leetcode questions in a while and when I was asked, it was an easy level problem. I don't know where they ask hard leetcode problems, I also never solved a hard leetcode problem on my own.

I'm routinely asked LC Hard questions in interviews. Sometimes more than one in one 45 minute interview.

That said, I interview in silicon valley and I'm a mixed race American. (extremely rare here) I think a lot of people just don't want me to pass the interview and will put up the highest bar they can. Mind you, I often still give optimal solutions to everything within good time constraints. But I've practiced 1000+ problems and done several hundred interviews.

Do you interview at startups?

Yes. I interview at everything from pre-seed to FAANG.

This is not how it works. The interviewer knows 1-2 problems and there is no time for profiling since they are rushing through their day, probably focused on their day to day work. You are the least of their concern, believe me.

Source: we am a hiring manager.

I’ve been the hiring manager too. You’re severely underestimating how many people operate.

I don’t think being mixed race is particularly rare in Silicon Valley?

Very rare. So is being American.

Absolutely not

Not sure about the timespan that you are referring to. Post covid hiring high, in the last 2 years or so, the hiring bar has been extremely high, in general. Not denying your experiences, may be it is even higher for you.

Personally, my experience has been that pre-covid, majority of interviewers were assessing your problem solving ability and if you can code the algorithm that you came up with. Getting the most optimal solution and fixing all edge cases for all problems in all interviews was not strictly necessary. But these days, even if you have the best solution coded up for 3 problems and missed one edge case in the 4th problem, you are not “good enough”. At one place, I was dinged for not thinking of the edge case before I wrote the program, even though I caught it while coding it up, in spite of having the write solution for the other 3 problems asked in the 2 coding rounds. It is a tough market, and probably tougher for you. Good luck mate.

The purpose of coding questions should be a problem that you can solve in about 20 minutes, then they ask another, and then you get 20 minutes to either finish or talk about other things. If you ask questions where either someone knows the trick and they pass, or they don't and fail you don't learn much. You need to watch the person write code to see if they are reasonable about it.

I was once asked fizz buzz in an interview and it made me sad that some people don't pass it.

I guess when you're brand new you don't know about the mod operator?

Yeah I've interviewed people who didn't.

Did you finish the interview or just call it there?

Even if you don't know about modulo, or (floor) division, you could subtract in a loop and see if you reach zero. Obviously not a good approach, but would demonstrate the kind of basic problem solving skill and ability to "write any working code at all" that this sort of thing is supposed to screen for.

You could improve that and still avoid any division or modulus by simply keeping track of when the "next fizz" and "next buzz" should occur. (And output "fizzbuzz" when those numbers are the same and you reach them.)

But if you're brand new, you aren't qualified for this job. I guess it was a quick way to assess, if you can't solve this in 60 seconds, we can end the interview early? But I thought it was odd still.

I interviewed at an investment bank in London and they asked me pretty hard questions. One was to implement some multithreaded producer consumer thing in C++. I can't remember the details but it was... well you know how writing multithreaded C++ is. I was allowed to look up references at least. Took me maybe 20 minutes and the whole time the interviewer was just sitting on his phone while I wrote it.

Weird experience. Didn't get that job (probably for the best tbf).

If you wrote an MPSC queue (standard question) with multithreaded demo in 20 minutes in C++ you’re pretty hot shit, mate. Their loss. It’s not that it’s hard. But that speed without error is just really good. C++ is particularly unforgiving too.

I can't remember the exact problem or how long it took but it was definitely some awkward multithreading. I'd rate my C++ as pretty good but probably not hot shit!

He didn't get the job so changes are it wasn't correct.

More exactly, you can't invent algorithms on a spot which took who knows how many years for others to invent. I.e. the question ends up being more if you know about a specific algorithm, which results in "invent it if you don't know about it". It's absolutely silly to test for ability to invent one on the spot, so it's a pretty pointless interview question really.

You can for simple algorithms. It's just really easy for interviewers to overestimate how simple an algorithm is when they have been told the answer.

Yeah, that's exactly the point. These kind of algorithms are far from easy to invent even if they look simple once they are known.

I hate when it asks for a memorized specific problem, but most of the hard ones I found needs a clever twist of a well-known algorithm, and I still struggle at that too for hard LC.

> Or at least, that's my expectation: I've never actually considered working somewhere that does leetcode interviews.

Hrm. So what you're saying is you've never actually taken or given this style of interview. Nor presumably ever worked at a company that did this interview. So if on the off-chance these interviews actually were a somewhat successful tool for filtering candidates you wouldn't actually know it?

That feels like a miss.

Your criticism is valid.

I've also never worked at a place that uses beatings to improve employee morale. So, I can't guarantee that beatings aren't an effective technique for doing so.

lol.

My deeply unpopular opinion is that "leet code style" interviews are actually pretty decent at avoiding false positives. Obviously some specific questions are gotcha trivia and many interviewers are bad no matter the question. But they're a reasonably accurate proxy. Their issue is false negatives.

End of the day the ONLY question an interview sets out to answer is "will this candidate be successful in this role". Interviews are strictly a proxy for "the real job". So arguments that "it's not reflective of the real job" are utterly irrelevant. It is not possible for ANY interview to fully reflect the real job. And you can't ask someone to quit a steady job to trial for 3 to 6 months to see if they're a good fit or not. So we're stuck with proxies.

I definitely think it's important for people who are hired to write code to in some form demonstrate that they are capable of writing code. That seems reasonable. But we can't expect candidates to write a big project for every place they apply. That's too much. And almost all candidates can't share code from their prior job. And solo GitHub side project are quite frankly not relevant for 99.99% of candidates. (And maybe more).

The one tried and trued method of hiring is to hire people you've worked with before who were good. This is not scalable.

Hiring is hard. Really really hard. I find that the vast majority of leet code complaints come from people who don't hire. If anyone ever cracks the puzzle of how to hire better they'll have a monumental competitive advantage. Many many have tried. So far none of have succeeded.

It's a fair point; hiring is hard.

It's been a while since I had to hire outside your "people you've worked with before" bucket, but when I did, here are the two questions which worked best:

1. Tell me about a time you analysed a complex problem and came up with a solution.

2. Tell me something creative you did at work. Something you're proud of.

In my experience, a good candidate typically had excellent answers to those questions, because (1) a good candidate has had to do some real engineering at some point and they can tell you about it, and (2) a good candidate has done technical work which they're really proud of just in and of itself, and they want to tell you about it.

A technical question was useful in reducing false positives, but something a couple of steps above FizzBuzz should be fine for that. You just find out anything useful about a candidate by asking them to recreate some esoteric CS algorithm on the spot, unless you really need to select for people who can recreate esoteric CS algorithms on the spot.

Depends on your experience and what you’re interviewing for. At a high enough level, the questions are pulled from the easier side, and the interviewer doesn’t want you to fail.

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