No, I think those are great ways to stand out and demonstrate interest and side projects and degrees are more representative of actual work. Leetcode itself though seems to be used as a gatekeeper benefiting those with the luxury of time to do the grind. It doesn’t mean you’re necessarily getting more qualified candidates and are possibly excluding some folks who would be more than capable.

Finding people with too much free time is the entire point of leetcode. Companies want employees who will dedicate their life to their work. If you don't have time to grind leetcode employers feel that you won't have time to work 60 hours a week and spend your free time thinking about work.

I think it's more common that people just have the unexamined assumption that programming skill is more of a natural talent than it is, and also that these tools are an effective way to test for that talent.

I'm sure what you're talking about happens too, but I've seen the other thing first hand a couple times so I know it can be less malicious than that.

I think people have over updated on spending free time on leetcode is the only way to solve these problems, but as a undergrad doing internship interviews, the problems weren't that hard?

Has it gotten worse in the last 5 years?

There are boot camps for developer interviews now. The practice is bad and it is inhumane. They will eventually go the way of other unintended gatekeeping disasters like the standardized high school/college tests.

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.

I do think it’s inherently unfair that high-paying jobs are placed behind arbitrary leetcode gates. Dedicating time because you’re passionate is great, but I’m not here to feed your hobby. My experience is that people who dedicate lots of time to development outside of work burn out around the senior engineer level because they never get to use the cool techniques they play with on their own time.

Most development jobs require very little CS theory or hobby projects to do the actual work. Most of what software engineers build are glorified CRUD apps. What those things tell a prospective employer is that you’re willing and able to grind yourself to the bone.

Case in point: I’ve been hiring people from local minority jobs programs for entry level dev roles. Yes they’re green as heck (usually just a coding bootcamp) and we have to handhold them for a few months, but it gives mentorship opportunities to our mid-level devs and after 6 months of project work you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference.

Not everyone can take a couple years off work to go get an advanced degree. These jobs are not so hard they require one. Credential inflation is out of control, and trying to hyper-optimize individual achievement often ends up building poor teams. Give me someone with good work-life balance and priorities outside work any day.

"people who dedicate lots of time to development outside of work burn out around the senior engineer level"

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?

>I couldn't do fizzbuzz to save my life

I don't understand. You clearly could take a spec "output numbers ..." and turn it into code, as you can take more complicated specs and code against them no problem.

If asked in an interview "Why should we use jitter when doing exponential backoff when packets fail", is that a more interesting question?

Is it the blank editor with no compiler/docs which makes it hard to write code, or the interview stress of someone watching?

How would you try and separate out the best of your co-workers from the rest in a day or two?

I would submit that humans cannot easily be ranked from “best” to “worst”; and even the most genuine attempts at doing so will only capture it for a moment in time as both the individuals’ skills and the business’ needs are constantly in flux.

And yeah, I feel you can adequately gauge someone’s skill level across a technical subject area in 4 or 5 simple “how would you” questions. The way they explain it will tell you a lot about their understanding of the subject matter. In the old days (when we were in-person and I was still a technical SME) I would have them use a whiteboard to explain a technical concept to me.

This job is not that hard. I think a lot of companies have an overly fond view of themselves and most of these complex interview processes are for their own ego.

You can discriminate on skills relevant to the role. The issue here is that these are extremely weakly relevant, but discriminate on features not relevant to the role.

The argument is that leetcode is a means to dress up the latter as the former. Prima facie, this seems plausible. I dont think it's racially/etc. motivated -- I just think interviewers like people "like them", and leetcode selects for "like them".

Another way to look at it: If you were running your own small business, given the choice between a candidate who had more of "studying CS theory, contributing to open source projects, working on hobby projects, earning advanced degrees etc" compared to another candidate... which would you choose?

Hiring is not about absolutes; it is about relatives (local maxima). When you work at an "elite" company, you quickly realise that you don't need to be a genius. For each open role, there must be 100 qualified candidates. As a candidate, you need to be a more-than-a-little-bit lucky to get the role! How does the hiring manager choose? Start with a baseline. Then pick the best.

I think you're right that it's a filter in favor of people who are willing to waste more time for their employer. I don't think it's unfair, just a bad hiring practice.

Be curious to see numbers on burn-out rates between people who do practice leetcode to get hired and people who don't bother with it.