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Comment by tick_tock_tick | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand the point almost all of the thing they list as downsides of using Leet Code are actually benefits. If someone can't manage to code some simple questions during an interview I can't imagine they'd ever make real contributions.

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I haven't done many Leet Code-style interviews, but the ones I have are usually simple-ish problems I'd have no difficulty with under normal circumstances, and yet I fail them at least 50% of the time.

There are a couple of things at play here:

1. I'm regularly complimented on how sharp my mind is, but I can't reliably recruit that sharpness on-demand. If I get any kind of brain fog during a timed problem (with no opportunity for a break), it's game over.

2. Coding in an unfamiliar environment, like Coderpad.

The problems are hard enough to make them easy to fail if you can't spot a good approach immediately, but easy enough that a "good" answer gives very little signal relative to the time being dedicated to the problem. I've done interview processes where 50% of the total process is given over to these kinds of problems, and the process concluded with me feeling I didn't get any real opportunity to demonstrate my strengths.

And last but not least they are geared towards puzzles of the type encountered during CS education. Thus they are age discriminating and they are non CS discriminating.

Even with my CS education, it's been over 15 years since I graduated, to say i'm rusty on the more academic things would be an understatement.

All of this is explained in the article:

- interviews are inherently more stressful than even a very busy day at work, - they cover topics unrelated to what you'd do as part of your job so if you're good at the job you might still fail the interview - people with time (==money) to prepare for interviews will come out ahead of those who don't have that luxury, despite the fact they may be far better prepared for the actual job.

So you get a bunch of false positives, a bunch of false negatives, and on top of that you're discriminating against people who are in a worse financial situation or have interview anxiety. I can hardly think of a worse outcome for a seemingly sensible hiring method.

What if they suffer from social anxiety and they just struggle under the pressure of an interview?

I’ve seen so many people over the years do terrible on these types of test that went on to be amazing contributors. We only found this out because we essentially ignored the outcome of these tests, which makes you wonder why you’re doing these tests at all!

if the "simple questions" are realistic problems they might face day to day, fair enough. But the classic example in these articles is an exercise like invert a binary tree, which most people never have nor will need to do, making it a poor test.

I think the worst part is that half the candidates will never have seen the problem before, and half of them will. Which makes it really hard to make fair comparisons.

>which most people never have nor will need to do

That doesn't mean that someone would be unable to program it. Inverting a binary tree tests if you know how to traverse a tree. I may not traverse trees all day at work, but I can easily do a tree traversal if I needed to and I expect that to be true of most people who can actually program and not just talk the talk.

I understand what you mean, I could also probably pass the test. But what is the utility in an arcane test like this? If I'm hiring web developers, I'd want them to see how they apply their knowledge to a realistic scenario. There is a real chance that a potentially great hire with decent experience in a desirable technology will fail the inversion task.

sure, I often have to do tree and graph traversals in my day to day but, I will 100% fail to do that under pressure with people looking at me and expecting me to "talk throught my thought process".

If you really really care about me traversing a graph, leave me alone with the task for a while, let me take my time, give me access to the internet even. Why do you care that I can write it on the spot? If anything that just proves that I memorised it just before the interview, not that I actually had to think much about it

And you don't really care if the person can invert a Binary Tree on the spot. You want someone that can do it if given the specification.

Because Leetcode hard is simple…

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