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Comment by Madmallard | Hacker News Reader

"What leetcode does do is make it difficult for minority candidates, those with external obligations, or those with families to get into firms. For example, I work 50+ hours a week with two kids and a parent with cancer. I work hard at work and have a lot of external obligations. I don’t have time or to study leecode problems."

This is actually such a bizarro answer I’m surprised it is getting tons of upvotes. All the techniques you learned in school can solve nearly every leetcode problem. You can get good at it with an internet connection and an hour a day. If you're going to work at my company for 2 years you better demonstrate you can do some preparation when there's literally 400 of you applying.

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This is always the response, but it still doesn’t make any sense.

It’s been 15 years since I’ve been in school, and probably about 5 since the last time any of the things I learned there were relevant outside of interviews.

You can certainly get good at it with an internet connection and a hour every day. But that is 50% of the time I have left to myself after all my obligations are fulfilled.

Anyway, that’s not the issue. The issue is that the alghoritms tested for in leetcode are never relevant to the performance of my application.

If you're not willing to spend an hour every day practicing to get the job the employer doesn't want you. That's the point of leetcode interviews. Find the candidate who wants it the most.

Yes, thanks, we got that. The point is that it is inherently discriminatory against people who don't have the free time to devote to that.

....And it's also kind of disgusting to say that jobs should go to the people who are willing to sacrifice their free time to study utterly pointless interview questions just in order to "prove" to the employer that they "want it most". That's essentially selecting for those willing to worship at the altar of the company—corporate bootlickers. (Don't get me wrong, I can see why employers would want to select for bootlickers. I just think it's disgusting and shouldn't be allowed.)

I suspect a lot of answers defending leetcode style interviews are cases of survivorship bias.

In my case it's drastically simpler and easier than the types of interviews I've had at places with even higher applicant demand like say Game Companies.

There really is no comparison in difficulty from getting a few simple binary search or iteration questions from a FAANG company and the kinds of things higher end game studios ask you.

Yes you are given the tools but given a novel problem from leetcode, how likely are you to solve it within the pressures and time constraints of an interview environment? And how is the problem solving process indicative of engineering competency? It misses on some key points, for example integrating DB queries, refactoring, clean code, good git commit messages. And I’d argue the biggest miss is evaluating how well you can read other peoples code.

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