Poll: Is the leetcode grind necessary to land a high paying remote job?

I personally would like to get to $175-$200 an hour as then it would truly be competitive with the above, but not sure how to get there

I suppose I could do my own acquisition; cutting out the middle man would probably increase my hourly rate, but that's a lot of work I don't like, and this works well enough for me.

At least in the UK, the contract market seems quite good for this early in the year, and usually peaks around summer. YMMV.

It obviously depends on your situation and whether you have any responsibilities; my opinion would probably be different if I had a family, but in my case I have little to lose even if things go sour. I won't be able to do this forever so I make the most out of it while I can still afford the risk.

In contrast, half that is doable for any mid-level developer and is still a major lifestyle upgrade compared to permanent employment.

Its super easy to get £1000-1500 as a freelancer who handles your own sales if you have the right credentials (degree, +5 years experience, do not completely suck at programming, specific domain experience, etc).

But yes, there is a whole industry of middlemen who try an convince suckers to work on a contract basis for around £500 a day.

Mind you - I'd love to see hard figures!

Context - We have a UK company with US parent, and choose to hire in the UK for this reason.

UK firms pay for private health insurance too, but that's supplemental insurance on top of NHS coverage.

Taxes also seem extremely high. I'm not sure of the situation in the US but 80k£ here already lands you in upper end of the tax brackets despite the rent on a decent 1-bedroom Central London apartment being ~50% of your monthly take home.

https://www.thedailymash.co.uk/features/how-to-be-poor-on-80...

Which appeared after someone came on Question Time complaining that £80k wasn't really that high

Many jobs are fully remotable now (tho it varies from almost all of them like Meta, to almost none of them like Apple). Sometimes slightly less money.

I can't generalise to all the teams and companies, but this was my experience, and I've seen some similar profiles around me. I suppose if you really check all the wrong boxes, it may be hard to land an interview, but once you're in the process, you have a shot just like anybody else and it really boils down at how well you do at the leedcode questions. Concerning diversity, interviewers are trained to avoid common biases on gender, age, and recruiters have incentives to interview people from minorities. I would say that if you come from a minority, you are at an advantage and you're more likely to get an interview.

What is clear, is that not everybody graduated from top schools. There are plenty of SWEs coming from developing countries. Older people are more rare. I was hired at 45, and the bar was a bit higher as they wouldn't hire me below a certain level. I've also heard stories of people hired at 55.. so there's hope.

If you're unwilling to relocate, you may be able to remote work from a different country. This depends on the company and the role, and which country you want to remote from, but it's doable.

To me, the main issue with leetcode is that it's not transferable kills. It may be very frustrating to spend 100s of hours doing these problems and not being able to land a job in the end.

I'd say it depends on many things. What level are you applying to. And also, how well you perform in situation of stress. And of course, in the end, it's a competition. If the other applicant can solve problems faster than you, they'll get the job and you won't.

For me the hard part wasn't solving the problem, but solving them in 15 minutes. At Google, 2/3 problems I got were hard and not medium. There would be no chance that I solved any of them if I hadn't seen them before.

I'd probably do something like that. No actual writing code, more of a discussion with them about ideas for solving it. I'd try to let them take the lead on approaches, just adding ideas to keep things moving if they were getting hung up on something.

After we've got what seems like a reasonable approach and I'm sure the candidate understands it, I'd then have us take a quick look at the official solution and see if it is along the lines of what we came up with.

Finally, I'd go to the discussion area for that problem and take a look at a few of the solutions posted there and ask the interviewee to help me do a quick code review of them.

The discussion areas for Leetcode problems are an often overlooked resource. They are full of proposed solutions with all kinds of issues. Sometimes they just won't work. Sometimes they solve the problem but don't meet the time or space constraints the problem asked for. Sometimes they work except for edge cases.

Mind you I’m talking in general and now in browser specifically

The idea that “reduce” is language specific is frankly mind boggling. It’s no more language specific than a loop.

For example, one client had a custom CMS/Webshop that was on its ass. It was a data corruption in their MongoDB (of course...) the code didn't really deal well with. They had contacted two people before who looked at it and said it was "unrecoverable" and nothing could be done. I solved it in an hour, and their business was back up and running. This wasn't act of genius on my part or anything: most people here probably would have been able to do it, it's just that the previous people were the software equivalent of quacks.

Needless to say, I earned a lot of points and trust with that, and did more work for them on various things, at reasonable rates.

But you do have to dig through a huge pile of crap to get these kind of things. Overall, it's not really worth it. Plus the cut UpWork takes is not in proportion to the value they deliver IMHO, so I ended up giving up on freelance work (I'm not the kind of person that's good at "hustling" in the tradition freelance sense).

I think you need to distinguish it from regular contracting.

The practice is just a veiled hazing ritual meant to strip you of dignity and agency.

If it isn't meant to do that...well, guess what? That's what it is doing.

And if I study real hard and maybe take a boot camp, I can join one of the illustrious paragons of internet virtue such as Facebook (sorry, meta block chain addicts inc.) or Google to spread ad-tech throughout the known universe.

Word. I left the industry to sit around my farm and raise my kids for about ten years. When I came back and started working with people I was shocked at how long it takes to learn anything about tech on the job. I was working on my own trying everything while I was away.

I noticed that my "senior" co-workers who had been working the previous whole ten years knew far less about the inner workings of the various tech they used daily than I did. I would rattle off something and expect a comment or answer and would repeatedly see architects and lead devs freeze up. I watched as they completely botched implementations simply because they didn't read the manual. The surprises were many because they used the same mental model to understand everything.

One implementation with a vendor required socket programming. They snapped and threw up their hands immediately in a big huff. I pointed out that C# had libraries to support that and that it was fairly trivial and probably way more fun than consuming a HTTP API. It took a few of us to calm them down and get it working but the dev who was assigned to it continued bitching. They were incensed at having to program against a TCP stream. It was so easy and trivial (imagine a binary string the size of an encoded JWT). He fucked it up bad and blamed the network for weeks.

In another instance, they were having trouble selecting a protocol for an external message passing framework. After selecting one at random I started asking about the protocol, mentioning that it sounded like it was based on "remoting (RMI binary non-routable transport). They had no idea. That concept of not having any idea about the underlying libraries and tech they selected was spread across an entire project, causing many real life disasters.

This all worked out great for me because I got use my deep knowledge a lot to identify root causes and fix thier messes which led to mahoosive salary increases and bonuses.

These bros were trying to leetcode everyone they hired. I couldn't do fizzbuzz to save my life. Just not interested in it. Is leetcode a filter to make sure you can work on the same old boring shit without losing it?

The study you provided was a phone survey of less than 1,000 people that occurred 15 years ago. It along with other studies showing similar results were debunked by researchers at Stanford, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania.

http://stanford.edu/~jgrimmer/comment_final.pdf

In order for me to add my family to my insurance I had to provide identification for each of them, including a marriage certificate and drivers licenses for myself and my wife. All that just to get health insurance.

In order to vote you should have to identify yourself and that you are eligible to vote in a US election. It's complete nonsense that getting an ID in the US is just too much of a burden.

That's how your manager is going to be hired, as well as all of his bosses on up.

I personally like take-home problems. It's hard for an employer to time-box them without resorting to basically leetcode though. I know that, as a student, I definitely spent many hours on them.

I'm sympathetic to the hiring side argument. But, I don't think the parent comment is insinuating that no technical question or test be asked of the applicant. They're not insisting on trust, they're insisting on showing their own intelligence. They're saying that the test or technical question should be directly applicable to the job at hand, for the company at hand. You can just as easily ask every single person who applies the same specific questions for the role at hand in your company. You don't need to rely on generic leetcode questions if they don't specifically apply to the job at hand.

In other words, hiring needs to actually be specific and targeted rather than adopting the "cast a wide net and catch whatever we can" strategy that many places seem to employ.

9/10 it feels like the insistence on leetcode from hiring comes as an excuse for rather weak recruiting standards and practices.

One of the things that gets me here on the hiring side is that the ease of “grinding leetcode” as a strategy seems to defeat the entire purpose of it as an interview question. I don’t want to dismiss the value of someone being able to study a skill and learn it, but I see a lot of people fixated on rehearsing leetcode answers like they were magical incantations you recite to get jobs, there’s not always a lot of real learning happening. That’s not reflective of the kind of candidates I’d want to hire or the peers I’d want to work with.

> A lot of companies give the option of LeetCode style interviews or take-homes and almost everybody chooses the take-home.

If true I’d like to see more of this. No hiring process is good for everyone and I think flexibility can be a better way to make a process fair, but I haven’t seen much of it personally. I don’t think I’ve personally gotten a leetcode problem at an interview in years- takehome problems have been the more common screening tool, but I don’t think I’ve ever been offered a choice in the matter.

> The idea that someone can allocate several hours during their busy day for a live interview but somehow can’t find several hours during the week for a take-home doesn’t even make logical sense.

I’m not sure this is entirely on the mark. On problem with takehome a is asymmetry. Most take home assignments I’ve gotten have come toward the end of an interview process, and there fine, but when I talk to more Junior folks it seems like they are often given hours long takehome problems before they ever talk to a human. That seems disrespectful of peoples time- it’s a lot to ask from someone who doesn’t even know if they are a fit or want your job yet.

In any case the hours long takehome is usually in addition to an bourse long set of interviews- not in lieu of them. Another common problem pre-Covid was that a lot of people just weren’t set up to work from home so it was harder to get the space and time to work on a project at home. I expect that’s probably changed a lot these days though.

Biotech interviews, for example, are usually conversational: what have you worked on before[0], how would you tackle this new problem, or troubleshoot a particular problem. There's this persistent meme that charlatans can BS their way though such an interview, but I really don't see how someone could learn enough to parrot their way through 4-5 x 45 minute meetings, often with fairly probing questions. It felt quite a bit like a thesis defense, in fact.

It's true that these aren't "repeatable": each applicant won't have exactly the same experience. This is "unbiased", in a sense[1], but has enormous variance: you're not only testing the applicant's aptitude, but also whether they've encountered this particular problem before. OTOH, tailoring the interview to each applicant' strengths might inject a little bias in exchange for a massive reduction in variance.

[0] It does help that candidates for these jobs had masters/PhDs, and therefore had at least one project they could discuss publicly.

[1] But not really...There's a subjective element to "code quality", fluency, whether the applicant wrote "enough" tests, etc.

As for leet code vs an actually relevant test - I think this is probably laziness on the interviewer's part. Coming up with a good test (and keeping it up to date) is hard, and leet code questions are "good enough" to filter out the people who don't know what they are doing. Remember, most companies are fine with a high false negative rate if it keeps false positives low.

This idea already exists in many forms. Pick any language, platform, or technical concept and there's someone offering training and certification.

It also describes the whole recruiting industry. "What if there was one person who did a lot of interviews and then presented just the best people to employers?"

It's an extremely human incentive alignment problem. Any certification program, interview farm, or bootcamp that makes more money when they produce more candidates will make quantity the goal, not quality. If you can figure out that problem, maybe there's a niche. Otherwise, it puts us right where we already are.

Well it’s not like the company you’re applying to has access to the test results from the company you’re leaving

> It's like companies are afraid that programmers will spontaneously forget how to program.

To be fair, I think most leetcoders agree that you need to practice regularly to keep your skills up. So if the point is to see how good you are at thinking algorithmically for the job you’re applying for, it makes sense that they’d want to see recent test results.

So we could call that a degree? And have institutions that specialise in testing for it? And because some of those institutions will be better at measuring this, we could rank them?

I thought most people complaining about the current approach didn't like this one either.

A qualitative hiring interview would be perfectly fine if the interviewers had no discrimination in their minds. The real solution is having minds without it. It's probably a goal hard to achieve with grown up people. Easier with newborns. So any solution starts from their parents, grandparents, etc and will stretch over many generations. Education, mingle with people from every origin and background, etc, pick your favorites.

How many generations? Limiting ourselves to the USA think how long it took for women to get a vote since the Constitution and for an Obama to become president since the end of slavery. We can hope that the trend is accelerating but who knows what's going to happen next. The state of the rest of the Western world is not so different.

This is the optimum. Now the good because there will be interviews to do this year. Any stop gap solution would do but don't invest too much into it because if you don't remove the real problem any fix will be worked around.

What we really need is for companies to stop trying so hard to find the absolute best most perfectest candidate that they screen out huge numbers who could have done the job but who missed some arbitrary keyword or coding test by a fraction.

We could call this a degree, perhaps in computer science?

This seems like an excellent idea!

Unfortunately my CS degree from a very-top school (CMU) counts for nothing in so many companies.

>Does a biotech company make their interviewees do lab work live?

Not biotech, but according to my cousin, pharmaceutical research interviews are even more arbitrary. He had chat with 5 employees who asked questions about their own rather esoteric specialties. Most of the questions were completely unrelated to the work that he ended up doing, and my cousin thought that the interviewers themselves were unlikely to be able to answer each other's questions. Unlike leetcode, this isn't something you can predictably study. It just so happened that the labs my cousin had worked in happened to specialize in those same niches. There are so many qualified postdocs that want to move to industry that interviewers can afford to be picky.

Google had this process because they are very academia inspired and want to hire the best academics, with a college campus but better work experience, because they had very high back end scale requirements, where algorithms do matter. They also had a shit ton of applicants and favored the false negative over the false positive, which they explicitly and publicly state. You might be able to argue that scale doesn't matter as much at google anymore, but google has no reason to change its process since it first established it, and back then they really had those hard scaling problems to scale up.

The reason why the software profession tends to have extensive interviews is because we don't trust credentialing or even prior experience. [0] We don't want to hire the unskilled bozo who can talk and have brand name credentials but when you actually put them to work find they are not that good at all. So we actually test their skill as directly as possible with various forms of work sample testing with as long as an interview process the market will tolerate, which has stabilized to 5 - 7 hours, or an entire working day.

The beauty of this is that you don't need to get into a med school equivalent with it's crazy requirements, spend 10 years-ish of training and go into 6 figures of debt, get a residency / hazing ritual in a few limit slots in the USA and can come from almost any poor background or country even and eventually make more than most surgeons. In that light, needing to spend 3 months to hard core leetcode doesn't seem so bad.

[0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

The combination of absurd profitability (of which the tiny slice allocated to employees still seems like a lot) and a complete lack of any actual objective measure of quality.

Because there's no way to really test whether someone is good at programming other than hiring them and seeing how it goes, and because there is an effectively limitless amount of money to spend trying to organize a "solution" to this problem, and because learning enough about each candidate to make a properly educated guess doesn't "scale" enough for fast-growth companies, senior management has plenty of room and lots of incentive to look like they've got it figured out.

For some, this is following their creative whims; for most, it's "do what FAANG does because it must be working, look at all the money they make."

Anyway that's my opinion on it. If I ever have the power to change hiring at any large scale, I'll probably follow my own creative whims and make it even worse.

I couldn't even remember how to write a for loop in bash, something so familiar it would be like asking me to recite the alphabet. Utterly humiliating yet comical experience looking back.

This is such a relatable description.

I don't think you even need a panic disorder to have this happen to you, this has happened to me a handful of times and it's absolutely the worst. It really is humiliating, totally ruins your day and you end up kicking yourself for several days after. I think this is just something that a lot of people do, like stage fright or something. The only way I know to avoid this is to do a lot of interviews with different companies that you don't really care about to get more confidence before you finally do get to the interview you care about, just so you don't choke during the one you want.

This rings pretty true to me, thank you for sharing your experience.

Like a driving test and the training with parents/adults beforehand.

Even with some judgmental/skittish passengers its the same.

This happens to me all the time! You’ve described it so succinctly. How do you cope?

I am really grateful that you brought up this point as well sharing as your own experience 'ryandvm. My own experience when I fail to think of an answer to a leetcode question is extremely similar if not identical. I would add that my own experience is always a silent panic similar to how I experience going on a rollercoaster. Many people will scream out loud when they are going down a rollercoaster; I just clench the safety/restraining bar really, really tight and look onward while clenching my teeth. I am surprised that it took this long in my career to hear similar feelings expressed by someone else, but I am grateful that it did.

Thanks again 'ryandvm! I really appreciate it.

The number of women increased, not so much the number of minorities[0].

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...

I think you are blending all of those problems together (there are three - hopefully not all of them at the same time... that would be a worst day ever). It's pretty normal that someone can't get to work, and you end up with a last second scramble to get something fixed. When something ships into production and is buggy, what matters is fixing it quickly.

The point is that most developers do end up having to work under pressure from time to time, and the higher up you get, actually, the more critical it will be.

Often the same thing in for example, typical wall street firms before 2008.

https://thepractice.law.harvard.edu/article/the-model-minori...

It really bums me out when people reach for this kind of "how are you not getting this" slight. You could have just explained the reasoning without implying that the asker is an idiot. You're just making yourself harder to hear.

I don't have familial wealth and I can study for stuff. I happen to spend around an hour a day (most days) studying programming-related topics.

I'm sick of this woke nonsense pervading society.

Studying for a Leetcode exam has sweet-fuck-all to do with race!