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Comment by zenta | Hacker News Reader

The comments on these articles seem to generally come out in favor of standardized testing (specifically the SAT). I find that interesting because college admissions seemingly generalizes to candidate evaluation. And if you were to suggest a standard leetcode test for software engineering job candidates? Man, this place would go up in flames.

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> And if you were to suggest a standard leetcode test for software engineering job candidates? Man, this place would go up in flames.

I'd love to have a standard test for software engineering jobs that was accepted in the place of building yet another 8-hour sample React app.

Singular leetcode exam with large enough cohort repeated let's say twice a year and then graded on curve done in reasonably secure and controlled testing center would seem pretty reasonable alternative. Do it one time, get high enough grade and then use it for rest of your career.

It starts to sound pretty enticing. Essentially a certification that at least one time you performed at certain level. Ofc, verification is bit more complicated, but not impossible anymore.

I’m not for or against these leetcode style tests, but I think the difference is that they see a correlation between admission test score and how well they’d actually do on the course. Can the companies using “leetcode” tests prove the same?

A common thing I see missed in arguments against like leetcode is that good hiring pipelines would not look at just leetcode scores. You want leetcode + good project + system design. Leetcode is excellent for testing data structures and algorithms, reasoning about code and edge case etc. These are absolutely necessary but not sufficient to build good software.

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