Comment by skierguy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skierguy | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I have my masters in computer science and work on the Linux kernel at a company you know for a product that you know. I often miss the point of leetcode questions and lose points because I don't use some certain tricky thing that they specifically want me to study for before the interview. I personally think it's just a handy way to build ageism into the interview process, because it's all this academic-style stuff that I've used maybe twice since I graduated 5 years ago. And for people like you, you've probably only really heard about these things in passing because they're not part of most people's workflow.

Kind of like applying for a job restoring Native American artifacts and being asked tricky questions about artifacts discovered in Egypt 5 years ago. Sure, you might have noticed the story or even read a lot about it 5 years ago, but it's not going to be a part of your daily work. Different procedures, different materials, and different local laws? I guess you should get studying if you want this job! And really, I just wanted to see your problem solving style when I ask irrelevant questions!

But ya, I think it's fair to say that my degree helps me not take that sort of thing as a rejection of my intelligence or qualifications though. I don't feel lesser than. I just feel belittled by someone who doesn't put effort into their interviews, which is useful information if you're considering working with them.

I have trouble with leet code problems because I'm 100% used to teasing requirements out of real people, whereas leet code has a skill of exactly reading and understanding the exact implementation requirement the question is asking. That and well real debugging tools in real life versus the sometimes broken web versions (I spent 45 minutes on an 'friendly' interview debugging the debugger in an online testing system which was truncating output and having threading issues).

Which is funny because I was prepping my Daughter for leet code for interviews, she only practiced leet code all summer despite me pushing her to do some open source or pet projects (aka real code). She's much better at LC than me despite barely being able to code in real life. What's really funny is that she got completely owned when I and some friends asked her the same leet code questions verbally but leaving ambiguity in and not specifically calling out all edge cases. We did about 10 practice verbal questions before she actually interviewed so she got better at it... and then she got asked one leet code question read off of the site.

It's fun watching how fast she picks things up esp with the ability to ask me and her mentors questions. She calls that "powerleveling"

I mean, it's literally called l33tcode... It's really a handy way of building l33t d00dz culture into Big Tech firms. Gatekeeping at its finest.

I see it more as a sign of reviewing incompetence. Or perhaps lazyness, or wanting to haze the incoming devs the same way they were? Either way you slice it though, it's unrelated to the actual job we do and should be done away with.

A more boring answer is probably risk management. You don't want to be the radical that introduced a new innovative interview process and produced false positives for your company.

It's like how everybody knows IBM sucks but nobody gets fired for choosing IBM (TM)

If you want change, it has to start at the top of the management

One has to admit, there's also a certain elegance to the l33tcode thing. It's all about easy-to-survey "code katas" taken to an extreme level, which is pretty much what you'd want if your problem was to cheaply select the most likely capable 1% or so out of some huge amount of applicants. But most real-world code problems look nothing like those clean whiteboard examples.

> I personally think it's just a handy way to build ageism into the interview process, because it's all this academic-style stuff that I've used maybe twice since I graduated 5 years ago.

I'd argue it's time-ist in that it works against those who don't have time to prepare for a leetcode interview. Candidates of any age can grind leetcode, but I concede college students have more time on their hands, compared to someone with 3 kids and a demanding job.

IMO, interviewing at big tech is like the Spelling Bee competition; asking people to spell 4 or 5 letter words is hardly a filter; so you start giving increasingly longer and unusual words and it becomes a feedback loop with kids have to getting coaches and spending an inordinate amount of time studying, which raises the bar further. The end result is only those who invest a lot of time can get anywhere (and sometimes still fail), and those who don't prepare barely get off the ground unless they are geniuses.

Leetcode-style interviews seem to be somewhere between "what year did you take your last algorithms course?" and "have you seen this problem before?"

I think the issue is that you're not taught how to interview people. So usually you'll notice that you need to do an interview in a few hours and scramble to think of what to ask and leetcode is the easiest thing that comes to mind.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com