Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

I interview candidates regularly.

Most engineers need no more than half a dozen interviews to get couple of options to choose from.

Unfortunately, there is population that grossly overestimate their ability, don't prepare effectively at all and take as many interviews as they can thinking it is numbers game. Then blame "broken system".

It reminds me when I went for exam for driver's licence. There was a group of people complaining at the examiner and broken system after one person failed their 27th attempt due to some "silly" problem like almost running a pedestrian. I had fun noting they already all know each other and then I passed on the first try.

The people who complain the loudest are mostly ones like that. Clueless about what they are doing wrong, not willing to honestly retrospect and evaluate their situation, learn from mistakes.

This is their modus operandi. If you always try to find external cause of your problem where a lot of other people clearly succeed, there is a systemic problem with you that prevents you from effectively learning anything.

If this is you, I don't want to work with you. I want people who if they encounter same failure over and over again will eventually stop to think what they are doing wrong. Or who will not start by blaming compiler for their broken code (I had a coworker like that - total disaster).

The first step to solving a problem is admitting there is a problem.

The whiteboard problems we give are nothing out of ordinary. Unfortunately, they are also biggest filter as a lot of candidates who seem to know basics of Java can't write a simple function to specification. I understand some are due to stress even though I try as much as possible to relieve stress, give hints, etc. My boss once tried to listen to popular "advice" and get rid of whiteboard tasks. The next two hires were total loss and we had to fire them within 6 months. We are again giving whiteboard problems.

While I agree with you that theres a few like that, you have forgotten about the candidates that genuinely don't want to spend their spare time grinding leetcode.

I worked at facebook, when I started looking for a new job, I had to start grinding leetcode again to prepare for a new job. Take a step back and realise how ridiculous this is.

Big companies that have prestiege and pay alot of money use it to eliminate false positives, not to actually recognise true positives. If your at a big company that can afford to throw away many true postives, sure use leetcode, but the rest are hurting themselfs by blinding following the mantra of FANG.

If you can't readily demonstrate ability to write a simple function but insist on getting hired as a developer you are, by definition, overestimating your ability as software developer, because you can't code.

If you need to grind to be able to write code you are doing something wrong. Like spending too much time at work copying code from stack exchange or relying on running your code to tell you if it is correct.

Grinding leetcode != software engineering. That is my entire point, not sure why you're confused.

Why do you assume it is I who are confused?

Never had to "grind" to get any software development job I wanted even though I am always expected to demonstrate my coding ability.

Actually, I wouldn't let myself be hired by a company that does not verify if their candidates can code. Too much of a drag working with people who can't pull their weight.

> Never had to "grind" to get any software development job I wanted even though I am always expected to demonstrate my coding ability.

Good for you. Either you are quite gifted or you're not talking about interviews in FAANG or other similar companies like Doordash, Instacart etc. but rather other "easier" SF startups.

I think you seem to be assuming two things: 1. Most interview questions are intuitive and one should be able to organically come to an efficient solution within 40 mins without any prior practice. 2. Anyone who can't do that, is not worthy of being a software engineer

In my experience, both those assertions are false. If you look at the difficulty of questions companies are asking, I can assure you that no reasonable software engineer (unless they do competitive programming as a hobby) would be able to solve them. On the other hand, even a mediocre engineer who has been "grinding" on Leetcode will have a far better chance on solving them since they have seen them before. In short your prep of interview

At this point, it appears to me that the companies know that Leetcode exists and that their questions end up there and they still ask the questions marked as "hard" since most serious candidates would have already prepared for the "medium" ones.

If the exercise requires some kind of leap then it is a bad task for interview. For example: "please, implement A-star". On the other hand, better task is one that removes unnecessary leaps: "given this description of A-star, please, implement it". Which is what I try to do when I prepare tasks.

After all what I want to learn is how a person approaches implementing something and not whether they have good enough memory and luck.

If those FAANG companies do something else, it is their problem. There are so many companies you don't absolutely have to work for them.

The only reason they can get away with this is exactly because a lot of developers think either FAANG or bust.

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