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

Re:Poll: Is the leetcode grind necessary to land a high payi... by neilsimp1 on Thursday January 27, 2022 @10:51AM (#30101989)

Not OP, but we often include these two in our interviews:

1. Write code that will find the second largest item in an array on ints.

2. Write SQL that selects the second highest number from a DB table.

I'm floored how few candidates can do these. Many end up giving up or fiddling for 10 minutes before giving something like `SELECT table WHERE 2`.

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Re:Poll: Is the leetcode grind necessary to land a high payi... by deckard1 on Thursday January 27, 2022 @03:09PM (#30105706)

wouldn't be surprised people miss the SQL question. Full stack devs are rather rare nowadays, and it's a bit obscure SQL trivia considering the answer is dependent on which SQL db you're using.

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Re:Poll: Is the leetcode grind necessary to land a high payi... by throwawaygh on Thursday January 27, 2022 @05:45PM (#30108075)

Modulo syntax/keywords, I think the following query would work in any modern dialect:

    SELECT num FROM 
        (SELECT num FROM nums ORDER BY num DESC LIMIT 2)
    ORDER BY num ASC LIMIT 1;

which is actually nearly identical to the simplest Python solution in terms of the computation that's specified:

    lambda xs: None if len(xs) == 0 else sorted(xs)[-2:][0]

I think the reason the question is tricky for some is because they either:

1) haven't used SQL in a long time and forgot all the syntax, or else

2) don't really "grok" SQL as a model of computation (as opposed to e.g. a data structuring language or something like that).

But both of those seem like good reasons to disqualify someone from a full stack role?

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