Is there anything wrong with preferring people who have spent a lot of time practicing leetcode?
Most jobs prefer people with certain kinds of experience vs raw cognitive ability. Raw cognitive ability doesn’t mean much outside of entry level jobs.
I don’t believe the interview process would be any more efficient or effective for software engineering roles if they started preferring pure “cognitive ability” to leetcode effort.
Assuming all other things are equal, obviously anyone will choose the candidate who can do these questions vs one who cannot.
The problem, obviously, is that all other things are seldom equal IRL. So, the issue now becomes : Would you rather hire someone who has a solid github profile but can't whiteboard algos, or someone who doesn't have any past portfolio but can ace whiteboard algos.
If you give me 20 years, I could probably get a PhD. Given ENOUGH time, anyone could theoretically achieve anything. But the differentiator between candidates happens when the clock is ticking.
I, and most other employers, are not looking for perfect answers. We want to know how you approach a problem under these constraints : short time, high pressure, unseen problem.
We want to know whether you are the type who chokes. It tells us that your desire to look good in front of someone (or conversely, your fear of looking bad in front of someone) fills up your mind more than your desire to solve a problem.
Would you choke if you mom asked you the same question - No, because you don't fear being judged, right ?
We want a similar trait in our developers. We want you to GIVE VERY LITTLE SHIT about what we think of you, at least for the next 30 minutes. We want you to have enough control of your mind to TEMPORARILY ignore our existence and focus on the problem at hand.
Granted, such scenarios occur rarely IRL, but it tells us a lot about how much control the person has over their psyche, how honest they are about their limits, what they do when they reach their limit etc. It's as much a behavioral test as an IQ one.
Having said all that, not all companies need non-choking geniuses. Choking geniuses work fine for many.
> I, and most other employers, are not looking for perfect answers
I wouldn't agree with that. Most of the interviewers I had at the end of the day didn't want the take the risk of "hire" if the answer wasn't like they expect.
> We want to know whether you are the type who chokes. It tells us that your desire to look good in front of someone (or conversely, your fear of looking bad in front of someone) fills up your mind more than your desire to solve a problem.
I think that can be better written in the job requirement. I would think twice before going to an interview which the solely purpose is to make an artificial stressful situation, out of an already quite stressful situation, just to see if I break or not.
Yeah, I can give zero shit if the stakes are low or if I am not interested in the job or the company for example. What happens is not my ego is hurt, but before I go for an interview I am already emotionally invested that I want to work for that prospective company.
All that said, people come from different backgrounds, imagine interviewing someone who is constantly judged in life and/or have struggled with bad managers prior to expect they would be free like a bird in front of failure.
The problem is that you're not paying enough for this. You're just not, even if you're FAANG. A smart dev can likely find a good answer for you---but it will almost always be true that it is a better answer, for them personally, to just go work somewhere else.
We are not paying you to SOLVE the problem with those constraints.
We are simply evaluating how you APPROACH a problem with those constraints.
If given such a problem, you throw your hands up in the air, or give me a lecture about how such a problem does not occur in real life, or how it doesn't represent your best-self, that itself tells a lot about you.
My question, as I repeat in other comments is this : WHY do you feel stressed ? Delve into your psyche for just 1 minute and it will boil down to - fear of being judged as incompetent. All we are looking for is someone who can set aside this fear TEMPORARILY.
You don't feel pressure if your mom throws you this problem, right ? Can you do the same even if a million people are watching, but just for 2 minutes ?
Even if we throw you a NP-Hard problem, can you objectively spend 2 minutes thinking about it, talking another 2 minutes about how you'd approach it, and then saying, 'This looks like it's beyond my skillset' - That clarity of thinking, mastery of fear, and blatant honesty is worth a hundred github apache open source projects.
People who can't do this lack the maturity to understand that in real-life, nobody really gives a damn about our achievements and failures except us (and very close relatives of course).
I think you are kidding yourself if you think the majority of these companies are satisfied with an answer consisting of "This looks like it's beyond my skillset". All things considered, they are going to progress the candidate who can solve the problem because it's an early stage test.
I wouldn't feel pressure if my mom threw me the problem, but I still probably wouldn't be able to come up with a solution (or even approach anything useful in a reasonable amount of time) that would satisfy an interviewer because frankly, I'm terrible at it and haven't spent the time to get good, just like many, many other successful developers.
Stress is only one aspect of these that people dislike.
>All we are looking for is someone who can set aside this fear TEMPORARILY.
Why should I do this? Fear is a survival signal, why should I ignore it? It's not fear of the problem, it's fear of the company. And is this not a justified fear? You say not to be afraid of being judged, but isn't that the entire purpose of the interview?
Now, there is a scenario I can imagine where I have some pride invested and am willing to be a fearless engineering badass, the developer equivalent of a Marine. But the Marines are loyal back in return, never leaving a man behind, etc. I'd also happily attempt such a problem for my mom, because I know our relationship isn't dependent on this particular problem. Is your company going to be as loyal as the Marines, or love me unconditionally like my mom?
Why do you say that FAANG isn’t paying enough for this? They seem to be, since they are hiring more than enough engineers in this manner to build even trillion-dollar companies. I doubt they give two shits about the developers who decide to work elsewhere.
Sure, they hire a good # of devs---who then mysteriously want to go into management, leave to start a startup, or simply complain about their bosses. No one with actual agency and power in the matter chooses to stay in that position, once they understand what it is, what their options are, and aren't handcuffed by a mortgage. Or perhaps the company isn't as dysfunctional as the interview, and they stay---in which case it is just the interview that's miscalibrated, serving as an arbitrary hazing ritual.
Despite any problems they have, they are able to retain enough devs to get their work done. Are they losing out on even $1 of earnings because of their inability to hire devs? Even with the arbitrary hazing ritual in place?
> Is there anything wrong with preferring people who have spent a lot of time practicing leetcode?
If you care about diversity and inclusion, yes. This interview format prefers people with formal education, extra time, good mental health, no kids, etc.
This can easily eliminate some women + caregivers + those with kids, the self taught, people that struggle with mental health or learning disabilities (including ADHD), etc.
Anecdotal story:
Studying LC because I'm self taught led me into burn out and I ended up with an ADHD diagnosis (common for women to get diagnosed at an older age anyway). My ADHD brain wants to do things it likes and studying LC isn't one of them so it led to being burned out faster. A former manager even told me to slow down and I didn't listen!
I struggled for a while with interviews and getting my current job. Each additional interview became extremely traumatizing for me (which is probably compounded by Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria that comes with ADHD). It's been almost a year since I got my job and I still worry about interviewing again in the future.
For me, being a woman in tech with ADHD makes it really hard to walk into an interview feeling confident. It's intimidating to be obviously different then the vast majority of my interviewers and I'm so worried if I'll keep my train of thought and remember things or talk in a way that makes sense. And it spirals into me worrying if I make women in tech look bad because so many people seem to believe women are inherently worse.
Most jobs prefer people with certain kinds of experience vs raw cognitive ability. Raw cognitive ability doesn’t mean much outside of entry level jobs.
I don’t believe the interview process would be any more efficient or effective for software engineering roles if they started preferring pure “cognitive ability” to leetcode effort.