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Ask HN: If not LeetCode, then what?

17 points by random42 ↗ HN
I have been preparing to get the new job (If you are hiring in India or remote, please get in touch), and starting to get bothered by the interview specific preparation by leetcoding.

Is this the best our industry can come up with to evaluate the skills and experience of fellow professionals?

I wonder if I'd still be leetcoding in my 40s and 50s, or the industry would evolve to better ways to interview candidates?

Have you tried anything else in your organizations other than leetcoding that worked well?

7 comments

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sethammons
We don't leetcode. Our technical portions are coding and design. Coding is based on a real, recent thing the team or similar team has faced, distilled down to something that a team member should be able to do in about 15 minutes and the candidate gets 45 minutes. This gives time to ask and dig deeper in understanding. The design part involves designing a distributed system on a white board to achieve some kind of goal. We then talk about edge cases, failure modes, etc.

The rest of the interview portions are talking with someone about previous projects, how you have dealt with or would deal with given situations, what you've experienced so far, what you're looking to learn, etc.

sergiotapia
Been interviewing people with this:

https://github.com/sergiotapia/task-list-kata

Simple, 1 hour take-home, touches on code format, if they can code, logic, conditionals, recursion, and such.

I'm very explicit that this should take only about an hour, two if they want to go all out, but really no need to sweat the UI much.

badpun
For what it's worth, I haven't seen any of that in interviews in Europe, for senior positions. At most, there may be some fizzbuzz level question to make sure you're not a fraud. The interviews are mostly a chat about past experiences, opinions about technologies or something like "propose an architecture/tech stack for a problem we had". Also, often there are queries about specifics of technology they're using. All seems to be huge improvement over whiteboarding people.
muzani
Yeah, the standard template is just to find someone who is "smart and gets things done". I've been taking on both junior and senior dev interviews lately (junior because I considered a career switch to game dev) and the junior questions have been much harder than the senior ones.
random42
My previous job was in a European behemoth, and I really enjoyed their interview process (and later as an interviewer). Even though it was somewhat still based on Algo and DS, but none of them were obscure LC medium-Hard the focus was to understand the candidate's thought process.
tmm84
That is the best that companies cargo culting the big four have for evaluating the skills and experience of professionals.

The industry is going to have better ways in the future for sure. The current state of the industry is that many have access to a computer and the attitude that programming pays a lot so just walk onto the job and into excellence. Reality is obviously further from that dream.

Other comments have already shown other ways evaluating a programmer and I don't anything to really add.