We also give people time to learn the framework we're using as part of the hiring process. And we encourage them to do that if they want!
People with a tremendous amount of experience in our framework-of-choice have an advantage. But they're also more likely to be immediately valuable. It's imperfect, but it works well for us. And you'd be surprised how many people float right through the technical assessment learning as they go.
I was responding to this negative part of the introduction. Actually all of the mentioned frameworks are disallowed at Google (where leet code style interviews were introduced), because they are not fit for serving billions of people in the latency budget in the search/ads stack.
If you would rephrase it that for most companies leet code style interviews don’t make sense (and probably are your customers), I would agree, but the few where it makes sense are really important companies.
Take homes are great because the candidate either knows the specific frameworks, or doesn't but can learn them quick enough. Either way, if you complete it within the allocated time and get relatively high enough scores, we'd recommend moving forward.
Actually @xiphias2 what type of interviews have you seen that were really good? Like even the in-person ones, what made them good?
As an example of why for some (especially big) companies need deep algorithmic knowledge is that at Google I was working on adding new features to an ads prediction model, and even without changing the code base the new (slightly more complex) model increased the ads 99%-ile latency by 0.1ms (millions of dollars loss because of the RPC timeouts), which required director level exception there if I wanted to ramp up the experiment to total user traffic (the usual thing that people do is to optimize something else in the code base to stay in the latency budget).
The small problems that LeetCode provides for interviews are great filter for people in these companies when they are faced with much more complex optimization problems. The problem is when a small company with lots of user facing features uses the same type of interview (they shouldn't).