Re:Show HN: I made a job board that doesn't allow HackerRank...
by bra-ket on Friday January 01, 2021 @03:08PM
(#25606427)
Anything leetcode related comes down to rote memorization. If LC is part of interviewing process you are hiring people who good at repeating things they’ve memorized, have a lot of stamina to spend hundreds of hours doing meaningless work and are very good at following orders. If that’s what you need than it’s a great filter.
You can save some effort though and just hire anyone who passed Chinese or Korean grueling school system with emphasis on standardized tests. LC-based interviews follow the same tradition.
Re:Show HN: I made a job board that doesn't allow HackerRank...
by wulfmann on Friday January 01, 2021 @07:48PM
(#25609050)
It’s very company-dependent, but most are not wanting a regurgitated answer. If you have a solid grasp on data structures and traversals, you can solve a lot of those puzzle problems. Sure some have tricks, but they’re not completely pointless and certainly don’t indicate anything about the person being willing to “spend hundreds of hours doing meaningless work” or are “good at following orders”.
Pick some interesting problems from there, and without asking the candidate to actually code a solution, discuss the problems with the candidate. Ask for ideas on how to approach the problem, and suggest some yourself if at any time they appear to be getting stuck.
After they, possibly with guidance from you, have reached an approach that if correctly implemented would solve the problem, including meeting time and space requirements, discuss what issues might arise in actually implementing it, such as edge cases that might require special handling. This would be a good place to talk about how they would go about testing an implementation.
Finally, go to the discussion on LeetCode for that problem. There you will find various solutions posted by others. What I have found looking at those is that a lot of them don't meet the time/space requirements, or miss edge cases, or sometimes are just wrong. Go over a few of these with the candidate and have them criticize them for you.