Can’t just be me, can it? Currently 0 for 3 on interviews because I can’t seem to get past the technical interview/test. Usually because of some crazy complicated algorithm question that’s never been relevant to anything I’ve ever had to do on the job in all my years coding.
Also, while I’m ranting: screw the usual non-answer when given feedback.
I have never found the ability to regurgitate Leetcode solutions as reflective of programming skill or even good performance. I’ve seen what talent I get from FAANG hires and what talent I get from random people with state degrees. Most of the time I will take the later. I have yet to staff some crazy R&D project that actually required anything like the things Cracking the Code Interview tells you to do.
I’ve found a lot more success giving people reasonable design exercises based on company projects and code exercises related to actual work done. I have made a career of only taking jobs with similar interview processes and as I’ve grown into leadership I’ve continued to give interviews that accurately test day-to-day skills. Am I missing out on really good talent by usually ignoring FAANG resumes? So far I don’t think so and I don’t need those idiotic attitudes polluting strong, elastic teams either.
I see them as a flawed indicator of the ceiling of someone’s theoretical computer science abilities. Having worked with some brilliant people that career shifted via bootcamps, I will contend there’s value in having that foundation. I also prefer Leetcode problems over having to memorize search algorithms. But yeah, it’s not very reflective of day to day tasks even in R&D heavy projects. The most algorithm heavy thing I’ve ever done was implement Ramer–Douglas–Peucker to convert points from mouse polling into a simplified line.
(There’s clearly a “it’s what everyone else is doing” aspect to Leetcode, on top of being very practical to run, hence I why don’t see them going anywhere. They’re also as objective as anything in an interview will ever be, so as I always say: it can be so much worse.)
I intend to make the hacker “dive into an icky codebase armed with a stack trace and fix a bug” aspect of software development a part of my interview process; plus lean more heavily on system design questions which is where non-entry level engineers really ought to shine. The parts that worry me are the ability to create new tests as they inevitably leak, plus whether I can truly objectively evaluate someone’s performance.
I’m curious what you include and how well it works.