<story><title>I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews</title><url>https://nelson.cloud/i-am-so-sick-of-leetcode-style-interviews/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>XorNot</author><text>Do you tell them what the &amp;quot;mod&amp;quot; operator is before giving it?&lt;p&gt;The failure rate of FizzBuzz has always struck me as depending on the idea that you can do a lot of programming and just never need that operator.</text></item><item><author>sjaak</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve also used FizzBuzz at several companies, and the insane amount of people it filters out continues to boggle my mind.</text></item><item><author>ownagefool</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think the problem is the format, i.e. a 30-50 minute interview on simple coding with DS&amp;amp;A problems, but the escalation.&lt;p&gt;The reality is, fizz buzz got us 75% of the way there.  It turns out when pressed, a lot of people can&amp;#x27;t write code.  Yes, there&amp;#x27;s false positives, but there&amp;#x27;s also people brute focing their way through via copy &amp;amp; paste.&lt;p&gt;This doesn&amp;#x27;t manifest as a person who can&amp;#x27;t do any task, just as a person that&amp;#x27;s slow, delivers weird abstractions, and would take a lot of your time to get anything useful from.&lt;p&gt;But those people are also making those arguments, because, as you said, there&amp;#x27;s hundreds of thousands of dollars in it.</text></item><item><author>dinobones</author><text>Leetcode style interviews probably serve two functions:&lt;p&gt;1) A way to suppress wages and job mobility for SWE. Who wants to switch jobs when it means studying for a month or two? Also, if you get unlucky and some try hard drops an atomic LC hard bomb on you now you have an entire company you can no longer apply to for a year.&lt;p&gt;2) A way to mask bias in the process while claiming that it’s a fair process because everyone has a clear&amp;#x2F;similar objective.&lt;p&gt;Meet someone who went to your Alma mater? Same gender? Same race? Give them the same question as everyone else, but hint them through it, ignore some syntax errors, and give them a strong hire for “communication” when they didn’t even implement the optimal approach…&lt;p&gt;Or is it someone you don’t like for X reason? Drop a leetcode hard on them and send them packing and just remain silent the entire interview.&lt;p&gt;To the company this is acceptable noise, but to the individual, this is costing us 100s of thousands of dollars, because there’s only a handful of companies that pay well and they all have the same interview process. Failing 3 interviews probably means you’re now out $200-300k of additional compensation from the top paying companies.&lt;p&gt;I’ve interviewed for and at FAANGs. I can’t believe the low bar of people that we’ve hired, while simultaneously seeing insane ridiculous quad tree&amp;#x2F;number theory type questions that have caused other great engineers to miss out on good opportunities.&lt;p&gt;Someone will reply to me “if you know how to problem solve you will always pass.” Ok, come interview with me and I will ask you verbatim one of those quad tree&amp;#x2F;number theory&amp;#x2F;inclusion exclusion principle questions and I’d love to see you squirm, meanwhile another candidate is asked a basic hash map question.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arethuza</author><text>I once worked with a guy who was an incredibly good developer and I was surprised when he didn&amp;#x27;t see anything special about the number 64 (i.e. a power of two) - turns out that he&amp;#x27;d never done any bit fiddling type work so he hadn&amp;#x27;t had to think in those terms. It wouldn&amp;#x27;t surprise me if a lot of people hadn&amp;#x27;t heard of &amp;quot;mod&amp;quot; either....</text></comment>
<story><title>I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews</title><url>https://nelson.cloud/i-am-so-sick-of-leetcode-style-interviews/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>XorNot</author><text>Do you tell them what the &amp;quot;mod&amp;quot; operator is before giving it?&lt;p&gt;The failure rate of FizzBuzz has always struck me as depending on the idea that you can do a lot of programming and just never need that operator.</text></item><item><author>sjaak</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve also used FizzBuzz at several companies, and the insane amount of people it filters out continues to boggle my mind.</text></item><item><author>ownagefool</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think the problem is the format, i.e. a 30-50 minute interview on simple coding with DS&amp;amp;A problems, but the escalation.&lt;p&gt;The reality is, fizz buzz got us 75% of the way there.  It turns out when pressed, a lot of people can&amp;#x27;t write code.  Yes, there&amp;#x27;s false positives, but there&amp;#x27;s also people brute focing their way through via copy &amp;amp; paste.&lt;p&gt;This doesn&amp;#x27;t manifest as a person who can&amp;#x27;t do any task, just as a person that&amp;#x27;s slow, delivers weird abstractions, and would take a lot of your time to get anything useful from.&lt;p&gt;But those people are also making those arguments, because, as you said, there&amp;#x27;s hundreds of thousands of dollars in it.</text></item><item><author>dinobones</author><text>Leetcode style interviews probably serve two functions:&lt;p&gt;1) A way to suppress wages and job mobility for SWE. Who wants to switch jobs when it means studying for a month or two? Also, if you get unlucky and some try hard drops an atomic LC hard bomb on you now you have an entire company you can no longer apply to for a year.&lt;p&gt;2) A way to mask bias in the process while claiming that it’s a fair process because everyone has a clear&amp;#x2F;similar objective.&lt;p&gt;Meet someone who went to your Alma mater? Same gender? Same race? Give them the same question as everyone else, but hint them through it, ignore some syntax errors, and give them a strong hire for “communication” when they didn’t even implement the optimal approach…&lt;p&gt;Or is it someone you don’t like for X reason? Drop a leetcode hard on them and send them packing and just remain silent the entire interview.&lt;p&gt;To the company this is acceptable noise, but to the individual, this is costing us 100s of thousands of dollars, because there’s only a handful of companies that pay well and they all have the same interview process. Failing 3 interviews probably means you’re now out $200-300k of additional compensation from the top paying companies.&lt;p&gt;I’ve interviewed for and at FAANGs. I can’t believe the low bar of people that we’ve hired, while simultaneously seeing insane ridiculous quad tree&amp;#x2F;number theory type questions that have caused other great engineers to miss out on good opportunities.&lt;p&gt;Someone will reply to me “if you know how to problem solve you will always pass.” Ok, come interview with me and I will ask you verbatim one of those quad tree&amp;#x2F;number theory&amp;#x2F;inclusion exclusion principle questions and I’d love to see you squirm, meanwhile another candidate is asked a basic hash map question.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>azornathogron</author><text>You don&amp;#x27;t actually &lt;i&gt;need&lt;/i&gt; mod to do fizzbuzz, even if that&amp;#x27;s the most obvious way for people who know what mod is.&lt;p&gt;But without any &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; math at all you can do it with, eg, two counters and some if statements. Or  if you recognise that there&amp;#x27;s a repeating pattern you can work out that pattern manually and just write code to emit it over and over.</text></comment>