These questions have fuck-all to do with the actual work the happens there. Sure, you can usually find someone to tell you how much rainwater accumulates into a random bar chart, but I see as much brain-dead code at the top as anywhere else. As much great code, too, FWIW. Everywhere, the key skills that make for a successful IC are the same, and they definitely don't require implementing splay trees or skip lists from scratch and without references. 99% of the time it's shuffling bits around and using hash maps.
Honestly the people I work with who advocate the hardest for leetcode are the ones who had to grind hard and, evidently, want others to suffer too. As if a sane process would mean their own suffering was in vain.
The bar may simply be "sober enough to understand what it takes to succeed at this task", "committed enough to prepare" and "smart enough to solve them"
These attributes correlate strongly with success, I'd imagine.
Having sat on hiring committees, that's a fair summary. Most people are not very good at interviewing, because it's a weird skill, and nobody actually teaches you how to do it well. There's interview training, but it's incredibly short, and seems like half of it is about legal policy. There's ostensibly shadow interviews, but that tends to be luck of the draw on who your shadower is; most won't put in the requisite time to help coach you in conducting better interviews.
I think big companies like to pretend that leetcode interviewing scales well, without actually doing the time necessary to make it scale well.
> Right now my interview has a wash out coding exercise that is beginner oriented to get the resume liars but other than that it's all systems.
This is 100% what I've gravitated to. The longer I've interviewed people, the easier and easier the actual coding parts of my questions have become.
It's not like there aren't benefits to this process. Once you've buffed up, you're prepared for most major tech interviews. Common formats have their advantages.
That said, this format is just too expensive, and has poor predictive power.
and
// Once you've buffed up, you're prepared for most major tech interviews.
and
// has poor predictive power.
If "acquiring skill X" is broadly valuable (as you're saying in this case) then your ability to work on acquiring it is predictive of your success.
It's not predictive of the traits that mark a successful IC in my experience. I'm talking about areas like project planning, professionalism, large-scale system design, personal ownership, meticulousness, etc. Curiosity. Some of those might tangentially be covered by leetcode but I guarantee you important stuff isn't.
Everyone I've seen to fail, either via PIP or otherwise, has cracked these interviews. I've seen many fail over the years. Even worse, I've seen many whom I know would be strong performers, wash out because they got the wrong DP problem that day. Where's the benefit in a regime like this? The company loses and good candidates lose, too.
Or: "World's best banks and world's best traders have invested in subprime mortgages, they couldn't all be wrong?"
Using skin color for hiring is illegal and immoral and the government does not allow it.
Issuing sub primes is bad for business and blew up pretty quickly.
If asking programmers programming questions is "no different" from the above, which is it: illegal or bad for business?
If they were bad for business, why was it a common practice for so long? Does a business have no clue what's bad for business? Or is it just self destructive?
If "it's an established practice" argument also enconoasses things that are bad for business, and things that are immoral and illegal, maybe it's not a strong argument?
You have - companies that settled on this process, who have been able to attract top tallent that has cleared this bar.
You have - employees of these companies that were able to clear the interview bar.
And then you have - people who don't work for these companies, proclaim to have no interest/ability to clear the bar, but claim to have a valid view into where the bar should be.
In the absence of other data it doesn't seem like the last group is likely to be objectively right