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Comment by zzrrt | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't this imply that, had your friend not taken your advice, he would have failed and thus been an "obvious fraud", but a mere 3 weeks transformed him from fraud to competent programmer?

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The leetcode test is just a screening device. Passing it means you then go through the real interviews.

Also, if someone is unwilling to do the work to pass the leetcode test, they likely don't have the ambition to get the high pressure jobs.

If a good candidate can do it in 3 weeks, then a middling one can do it in 10 weeks, and a bad one in 6 months of memorizing. They all pass the screen, but two are lower-quality, and the bad candidate is about as much of a waste of the "real" interview as a total fraud would be.

If the bar is that low, just use an accredited degree, certification, references, or a proctored quiz with questions like "define a linked list in < 3 sentences," and it would be just as effective at filtering the very lowest, while more pleasant for everyone involved and maybe cheaper. Crammable puzzles that don't represent real software engineering don't provide much more value than those filters would.

As if these were high pressure jobs ... or had any rational reason to be high pressure jobs.

High pressure jobs correspond with higher pay.

> they likely don't have the ambition to get the high pressure jobs.

What absolute drivel. I've done plenty of leetcodes. I don't care about writing a qsort algorithm, I know the trade-offs, unless you're working for a FAANG or FAANG-adjacent company, the need to write your own sorting algorithm implementation is probably zero or near zero.

> I don't care about writing a qsort algorithm

That wasn't the point. Would you wash your car before picking up your date for the first time? A dirty car would drive just as well, but your date will figure you don't care about the date going well.

There is difference between being a tidy, kept person and having ambitions. You're conflating the two.

(Edit: Perhaps I should have written in my original comment: I'm nobody's code-producing monkey, I'm not dancing for money or peanuts)

No it means he fooled the interviewers

I don't think he "fooled the interviewers." The point of the story is that he focussed down on what the company's culture decided was important.

It's like cramming for an exam. Yes you can get enough information in your short term memory to pass, even do well. But a year later (or a month) it's all gone. You never really knew it.

True, but it shows a willingness and ability to do the work.

Such recruiting selects for KPI hunters. It is probably bad for an org to select for people that game it rather than doing "what is right".

A dice throw and some chitchat would be better recruiting.

These arguments all sound familiar to the "high stakes testing" debate about the SATs. The tests were unfair, did not measure college readiness, could be gamed, etc.

Then universities dropped the SAT requirements. Even MIT was suckered into dropping them. It was a disaster. It turns out the SATs were a very strong predictor of college success. MIT and others reinstated the SATs.

Ways SAT is more reasonable than typical leetcode interview:

  - you can take it ~3 times and most colleges will give you the best score without penalty
  - you can use your result to apply as many times as you want
  - if you feel stuck you can still get a good score by moving on to the other problems
  - it's administered uniformly across the world
  - you don't need to narrate your thinking while you're still processing information
  - you get an objective score instead of a pass/fail that may be subjective

All true, but still the arguments presented here sound the same as the arguments against SATs and "high stakes testing". I checked a bunch of major software companies, and all of them used leetcode as a screening device. (Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Apple, Anthropic)

Cargo cult nonsense.

That's the point we all see, but from context, the story teller apparently thought it shows that leetcode is an effective way to filter frauds.

And it is an effective way.

It's memorization, not understanding. It is not effective.

Memorizing is the first step to understanding. In grade school, one memorizes the alphabet for a good reason.

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