He did so. He aced the test. He got the job with a huge offer. He agreed that the ROI was out of the park!
P.S. I'm curious what your test is for obvious frauds?
Your friend would have spent three weeks practicing their sketching, right? And they would have made a decent drawing at the interview. And that would have the exact same ROI as spending those weeks on practicing leetcode.
The point is not that studying leetcode is good ROI. The point is that large orgs are testing for something that isn't relevant to commercial coding.
This is classic Streetlight Effect [0]. Just because it's easy to test leetcode, and it appears to have something vaguely to do with coding, it gets used.
Like I said in other posts, I would use the "pick a bug and fix it" method. But I'd also screen down from 100 candidates to ~20 or so before getting into technical interviews.
And, again, I don't think leetcode will scale well to 100 interviews either. You need technical staff in that interview room, and if you subject your team to 100 technical interviews using leetcode they're not going to be happy about it.
A dice throw and some chitchat would be better recruiting.
Then universities dropped the SAT requirements. Even MIT was suckered into dropping them. It was a disaster. It turns out the SATs were a very strong predictor of college success. MIT and others reinstated the SATs.
- you can take it ~3 times and most colleges will give you the best score without penalty
- you can use your result to apply as many times as you want
- if you feel stuck you can still get a good score by moving on to the other problems
- it's administered uniformly across the world
- you don't need to narrate your thinking while you're still processing information
- you get an objective score instead of a pass/fail that may be subjectiveAlso, if someone is unwilling to do the work to pass the leetcode test, they likely don't have the ambition to get the high pressure jobs.
If the bar is that low, just use an accredited degree, certification, references, or a proctored quiz with questions like "define a linked list in < 3 sentences," and it would be just as effective at filtering the very lowest, while more pleasant for everyone involved and maybe cheaper. Crammable puzzles that don't represent real software engineering don't provide much more value than those filters would.
What absolute drivel. I've done plenty of leetcodes. I don't care about writing a qsort algorithm, I know the trade-offs, unless you're working for a FAANG or FAANG-adjacent company, the need to write your own sorting algorithm implementation is probably zero or near zero.
That wasn't the point. Would you wash your car before picking up your date for the first time? A dirty car would drive just as well, but your date will figure you don't care about the date going well.
(Edit: Perhaps I should have written in my original comment: I'm nobody's code-producing monkey, I'm not dancing for money or peanuts)
Exactly what we do on day-to-day basis is what we do when we are trying to grow the team. I would guess that 85% of my team would fail leetcode-style screening right now (which is good cause it is garbage)
I interview them and ask questions! Seems good so far.
...and everybody clapped?
I have news for you: passing an online leetcode is now so easy that an AI can do it. If you think you're catching the cheaters, you're just wrong.
Leetcode was always a stupid test of competence, but it was cheap and it had a high true-negative rate, which filtered the riff-raff. That isn't true anymore.
Man, there are times when I really hate this industry.
Or as I'd like to call it - Wednesday :)
I'm sorry, but if I'm doing the hiring, the person who isn't willing to come on site to do an interview will be one of the first people off the list to hire (I mean, unless it is a remote job, and the person is nowhere near the employer, obvious exceptions would apply).
In-person interviewing can be extremely valuable. Will it filter out every bad candidate? No, some people excel at faking it. However it can be a big help in finding a good candidate.
Nobody said anything about not coming on site. That's how we used to do it, in the ancient pre-history of 2019. What I said was that if you bring someone on site only to leetcode them, you deserve not to hire anyone.
The downside, of course, is that you don't have the cheap, dumb pre-filter of a memorization test anymore, so you'll have to figure out a better way to winnow down the applicant pool whom you're willing to pay to bring on site.
Maybe finally software engineering will achieve a level of interview maturity seen in other professional fields...but I doubt it.
So this is a new presentation of an old problem, I guess is the takeaway there.