114 karma · joined February 20, 2022
LeetCode problems seldom resemble real-life coding scenarios, which in theory is what you are supposed to be most concerned with.
Why not present them with a real problem that you actually had to solve for your business? And ask them to walk you through how they would try to solve that? Perhaps as part of a take-home assignment?
Leetcode test or nothing is a false dichotomy. Accepting it is lacking without attempting to look into alternatives doesn’t seem logical.
>You can certainly memorize solutions
You can most certainly memorize the high level steps to LC problems. In fact I would argue that this is already the status quo. You may still be able to learn how they would approach a problem this way, but if they are good at “selling themselves” they can make all that “seem” real as well.
LeetCode questions as interview questions are mostly theater. Most people who do well on these aren’t actually “solving them” on the fly from scratch. They just happen to have seen the exact same problem before and retake the steps they’ve memorized to get to the answer. Testing whether or not someone can regurgitate the solution they have memorized to a math problem doesn’t tell you much about how they will perform in a truly novel non-contrived constraint problem scenario, which is generally what most dev work entails.
Perhaps if you are working at Bespoke Algorithms ‘R Us, benchmarking this would have more value to your org, but for most dev roles at most companies it is hard to see it as more than a compliance exercise, or maybe even as a tool to weed out those with families that can’t devote the hours/day to LC memorization.
Whether or not someone gets an A or a C in a course for Physics likely will not have any bearing on the needs of an employer who needs someone who is a Python wiz for data science.
Maybe the bigger problem is colleges offering undergraduate majors which lack demand, coupled with in-demand majors not having enough relevant course content for the job market, or maybe employers have just gotten more unreasonable in terms of expectations for graduates over time?
It's hard to make the argument these students are less qualified.. look at the acceptance rate of top schools over time, its essentially at or near all-time low percentages for the majority.
However, this might not matter as much now as it did in the past due to nuclear weapons being the primary deterrent in war these days, and the fact that our standing fleet of aircraft, aircraft carriers, nuke subs, tanks, etc... is essentially second to none. Additionally what we do have is highly capable and extremely specialized, in my opinion, leading to not really needing as many (quality over quantity). Take for example, an F35, which doesn't really have an equal in the skies, we have over 630 of them, with the goal of having around 2500. China only has 300 J-20s which are basically a copy of the older F22. Russia only has 22 non-test Su-57s. Would we have a realistic need to build 1000 of them within a year?
Due to many factors, but primarily free trade and globalization, it's unlikely that we ever see that non-automated manufacturing capacity return, though if needed we could probably mobilize the economy via the defense act to force more manufacturing capacity, though it's hard to imagine we would currently need to.
"Acting Unexpectedly" can often mean following the actual laws and general guidelines for safe and/or defensive driving. I would hazard a guess that sometimes doing the intuitive thing is, in reality, unsafe and/or against the law. If the car does this in 99% of circumstances, and still gets rear-ended, who is really the problem here?
Some highlights from these sources:
[1] Today the millennial homeownership rate is 43 percent, well below the rates of generation X (67 percent) and the baby boomer and silent generations (77 percent). An important feature of millennial homeownership that often gets muddled in the media conversation is that it is increasing, and with few minor exceptions, it has always been increasing. The oldest millennials turned 18 in 1999, and every year since then there has been a net increase in the number of millennial-owned homes. Since the Great Recession, the millennial homeownership rate has grown faster than any other, particularly in the last five years while the economy has expanded quickly. Today, millennials are the least likely to own a home, but they are the most likely to purchase one.
Millennial homeownership is rising, but it is rising slower than it did for previous generations. The chart below (see link) compares homeownership rates for each generation as they age
[2] If we isolate the effects of delayed household formation proxied by changes in marital composition (i.e., we assume the marriage rate was the same as in 1990), we find the hypothetical real homeownership rate would have been 39.1 percent, 9.8 percentage points higher than current levels. As of 2021, there are 44 million young adults ages 25 to 34, meaning there would be 4.3 million additional homeowners.
[1]: https://www.apartmentlist.com/research/homeownership-by-gene... [2]: https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/real-homeownership-gap-betw...
As LLMs continue to improve, it would seem that it is only going to get more difficult to accurately distinguish between content which is AI generated vs human generated, so barring some kind of AI-detection breakthrough, these services will continue to plague students and writers with horrible false positive rates.