<story><title>Ask HN: What to do about ‘Good at programming Bad at Leetcode’</title><text>Over the past few years I&amp;#x27;ve met people who are really good programmers when it comes to putting together a full back end system , creating a very nice front end or creating any kind of app for that matter.&lt;p&gt;Many of these people are fresh out of college and the ‘industry’ puts them through leetcode&amp;#x2F;hackerrank style rounds that are needlessly hard. I’ve seen the kind of questions these rounds have and quite frankly, if I graduated this year, there’s no way I’m going to get a job.&lt;p&gt;Ever since &amp;#x27;Cracking the coding interview&amp;#x27; was released, every company&amp;#x27;s interview process has become like Google&amp;#x27;s and Google didn&amp;#x27;t have a particularly great interview process to start with.[0][1]&lt;p&gt;Now, there are several GitHub repositories that prescribe 3-4 month grinds on leetcode questions to &amp;quot;crack&amp;quot; the interview. And people do go through this grind.&lt;p&gt;The people who do manage to crack these rounds are not necessarily good at programming either because the time they spent doing competitive programming stuff should have been spent learning to build actual things.&lt;p&gt;The no-whiteboard companies are very few, hardly ever seem to have openings and not hiring junior engineers.&lt;p&gt;What would be your advice be to fresh college graduates, or anybody for that matter, who are good at programming but not at leetcode? Surely there must be a way to demonstrate their understanding of algorithms without having to spend 3-4 months memorising riddles&lt;p&gt;[0]  homebrew creator.. https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&amp;#x2F;mxcl&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;608682016205344768?lang=en 
[1] Zed Shaw gets offered a sys admin job
https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=93984</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>colinmhayes</author><text>Here&amp;#x27;s the thing, large tech companies aren&amp;#x27;t looking to hire engineers, especially juniors, who are great at being an engineer because that&amp;#x27;s incredibly hard to test for in an interview and almost impossible to scale fairly. They&amp;#x27;re looking for people who will devote their life to the company and can quickly learn new skills. That&amp;#x27;s exactly what leetcode tests for, so it really isn&amp;#x27;t surprising at all that every tech company does leetcode interviews. Really the answer is either commit to the grind or go for a job at a non-tech company.</text></item><item><author>throwaway1777</author><text>I disagree with this take to an extent. Take it to the other extreme and you get folks who can’t even solve fizzbuzz. So some coding bar is good.&lt;p&gt;Leetcode is a very learnable skill, and I would argue any decent programmer can learn it well enough to pass an interview. I for years thought I wasn’t good at it, then I actually practiced and I got job offers at google and Facebook. I have also optimized code quite a few times using algorithm skills I picked up practicing for interviews so it’s not totally a waste.&lt;p&gt;There is a limit though, and some companies are pushing it with absurd questions that you couldn’t reasonably solve unless you had seen it before.&lt;p&gt;In summary, algorithms are useful and learnable, but some companies take it too far.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Hermitian909</author><text>&amp;gt;  They&amp;#x27;re looking for people who will devote their life to the company and can quickly learn new skills&lt;p&gt;This doesn&amp;#x27;t reflect my lived experience in SV. People I know who learned leetcode skills and got into big companies usually work less than people who passed more practical tests and get into smaller companies.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d say big companies are trying to hire employees who are a &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; mix of:&lt;p&gt;1. Smart&lt;p&gt;2. Conscientious &amp;#x2F; willing to work hard on the right things&lt;p&gt;3. Existing CS knowledge you know well enough to explain and apply.&lt;p&gt;For some vague handwavy definition of &amp;quot;good&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;(2) is probably worth expanding a bit. Many people are willing to work very hard on &lt;i&gt;the wrong thing&lt;/i&gt;, this extends to engineering. As an example, a common failure pattern you might see is someone constantly struggling with how React works and what they really need to do is sit down and read the ~15 pages of documentation. But they never do, and just keep putting in 10 hour days with subpar output.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve met some legit geniuses (think Putnam winner) for whom basically no studying was required to pass these interviews. Companies paying top dollar are happy to have them. For people like who are less smart and need to dedicate ~100-200 hours of focused studying and practice, companies paying top dollar are happy to take our mix of smarts and willingness to do that work. But once in the company I haven&amp;#x27;t noticed any expectation to &amp;quot;devote my life&amp;quot; to it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: What to do about ‘Good at programming Bad at Leetcode’</title><text>Over the past few years I&amp;#x27;ve met people who are really good programmers when it comes to putting together a full back end system , creating a very nice front end or creating any kind of app for that matter.&lt;p&gt;Many of these people are fresh out of college and the ‘industry’ puts them through leetcode&amp;#x2F;hackerrank style rounds that are needlessly hard. I’ve seen the kind of questions these rounds have and quite frankly, if I graduated this year, there’s no way I’m going to get a job.&lt;p&gt;Ever since &amp;#x27;Cracking the coding interview&amp;#x27; was released, every company&amp;#x27;s interview process has become like Google&amp;#x27;s and Google didn&amp;#x27;t have a particularly great interview process to start with.[0][1]&lt;p&gt;Now, there are several GitHub repositories that prescribe 3-4 month grinds on leetcode questions to &amp;quot;crack&amp;quot; the interview. And people do go through this grind.&lt;p&gt;The people who do manage to crack these rounds are not necessarily good at programming either because the time they spent doing competitive programming stuff should have been spent learning to build actual things.&lt;p&gt;The no-whiteboard companies are very few, hardly ever seem to have openings and not hiring junior engineers.&lt;p&gt;What would be your advice be to fresh college graduates, or anybody for that matter, who are good at programming but not at leetcode? Surely there must be a way to demonstrate their understanding of algorithms without having to spend 3-4 months memorising riddles&lt;p&gt;[0]  homebrew creator.. https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&amp;#x2F;mxcl&amp;#x2F;status&amp;#x2F;608682016205344768?lang=en 
[1] Zed Shaw gets offered a sys admin job
https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=93984</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>colinmhayes</author><text>Here&amp;#x27;s the thing, large tech companies aren&amp;#x27;t looking to hire engineers, especially juniors, who are great at being an engineer because that&amp;#x27;s incredibly hard to test for in an interview and almost impossible to scale fairly. They&amp;#x27;re looking for people who will devote their life to the company and can quickly learn new skills. That&amp;#x27;s exactly what leetcode tests for, so it really isn&amp;#x27;t surprising at all that every tech company does leetcode interviews. Really the answer is either commit to the grind or go for a job at a non-tech company.</text></item><item><author>throwaway1777</author><text>I disagree with this take to an extent. Take it to the other extreme and you get folks who can’t even solve fizzbuzz. So some coding bar is good.&lt;p&gt;Leetcode is a very learnable skill, and I would argue any decent programmer can learn it well enough to pass an interview. I for years thought I wasn’t good at it, then I actually practiced and I got job offers at google and Facebook. I have also optimized code quite a few times using algorithm skills I picked up practicing for interviews so it’s not totally a waste.&lt;p&gt;There is a limit though, and some companies are pushing it with absurd questions that you couldn’t reasonably solve unless you had seen it before.&lt;p&gt;In summary, algorithms are useful and learnable, but some companies take it too far.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mikymoothrowa</author><text>&amp;gt; an quickly learn new skills. That&amp;#x27;s exactly what leetcode tests for&lt;p&gt;I don’t know where people get this idea. Leetcode used to test programming proficiency&lt;p&gt;I feel the only reason companies continue to take leetcode to absurd levels is because (a) they think harder questions would get them better engineers and (b) other companies are doing it</text></comment>