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Comment by MichaelNolan | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious what they will come up with. For smaller companies, leetcode style tests probably aren't the best, but for large companies that hire 10s of thousands of devs, leetcode style tests have a lot of good qualities. People who criticize leetcode usually prefer take home projects, pair programming with a current employee, "just a conversation" or something else, but these all have serious drawbacks at scale. Despite leetcode's flaws it has a lot of benefits:

* Objective and clear grading criteria.

* Unlimited supply of questions.

* Easily time bound to 30 min or 1 hr.

* Legal - i.e., no worries about disparate impact.

* Programming language/framework agnostic.

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And still these engineers cannot build anything. If you were to ask if I would hire any of my Google colleagues as a startup founder, I would say never.

I can't even begin to imagine what sort of mind could observe the quality of Big Tech's software output and conclude that there's nothing wrong with their hiring process.

My problem with Big Tech software isn’t code quality, it’s the deliberate user-hostile decisions they make. Leetcode-style interviews appear to be doing fine at getting people who can write code.

Now look at their market cap.

It's almost as if capitalism wasn't a good system for deciding.. well, anything, really.

Big Tech's software is faster and less buggy than the median software product.

Source?

Big tech software is successful and runs at scale.

I've got anecdotal experience in both worlds and no. Big tech software isn't faster (what you have is way more compute resources usually), and the claim about "less buggy" gives me goosebumps.

> Source?

All the software I use. Netflix works perfectly every time. HBO Max is garbage. Amazon's website and app are pretty good, although the actual goods sold are trash. Costco is exactly the other way around.

Apples to oranges. You're not comparing big tech to "normal-size" tech (in the context of the original article), you're comparing tech companies with the biggest budgets in the world, with companies that aren't tech at all. In your example, one is a media company, the other is wholesale/retail one.

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