> You can however assess how smart somebody is

Are you saying the Leetcode-style interview assesses how smart someone is?

Not OP, and I don't think it directly indicates how smart you are, but it does show you are at or above some smartness threshold (i.e. smart enough to get the answer).

If you don't get the answer, you might still be above that smartness threshold, but didn't get it for some other reason (didn't have time to study, didn't sleep enough the night before, interview anxiety, etc.).

Yes, being able to understand and apply algorithms and data structures requires some intelligence.

I know we try to stay away from the “we’re smarter than you” vibe here because it’s gross, but pretending leetcode style questions don’t require some degree of complex thought is absurd.

Personally, I need to practice leetcode style questions pretty regularly in order to perform reliably without reference materials. If more than a couple of months go by, the details of particular algorithms begin to fade.

I think it's unreasonable to expect people to spend their off time practicing these sorts of problems, in the same way we think it's unreasonable to require everyone interviewing to be working on personal development projects over the weekend. I suspect most working people simply do not have the time.

You can memorize a lot of them and forget everything in a year.

If enough people are doing it higher iq folks will bubble up in calibration

Which at the end of the day still doesn't test that you can do the job.

Ok but it does tho - all other things being equal and you better believe it they do have other type of interviews not just lc

Ok, tell me what other types of interviews do they do other than system design, leetcode, and behaviorial for engineering?

Lol yeah apart from sanitation, the medicine, education, wine and public order what have the romans ever done to us? In your view that’s not enough to make an informed eng hire?

Lol. So you can't give me any concrete examples. Got it.

Nothing tells me more about someone that is full of it than simply being dismissive of others. I ask for an example to support your argument, instead you chose to be defensive and give me attitude.

Exactly. If you have a candidate who can design good systems, solve complex algorithmic problems, and play nice with others, then I’d say that’s a pretty strong candidate.

> You can however assess how smart somebody is

Why not just give candidates a standard IQ test then? They are probably more reliable than Leetcode...

IQ does not tell determination/hard-working-attitude at all, in fact many with high IQ ended up being nobody, as high IQ makes learning relatively easier, most got used to that and just let the 'grit' go.

leetcode is the SAT for coding, not perfect, but at least it's close to fair play.

> IQ does not tell determination/hard-working-attitude

this is what everyone said a college degree was for. Or experience. Neither of which matter when a senior dev with 10 years of experience and two kids still has to find an hour or two a day for three months in a row to grind out textbook algorithms to fake problems. Just to switch their fucking job. Thanks to cargo-cult insanity, god help those stuck in miserable jobs that just want out.

To be fair, most are real problems, just phrased in a contrived way.

Yes, they're rarely encountered in most day-to-day jobs. But that doesn't make them fake...

I mean, if the actual solution in a work environment is "use existing solution from people who already did it" but you have to do solve it by route memory then it's a fake problem.

The actual solution for encountering a differential equation at work is wolfram alpha, not getting a pen and paper to apply heuristic knowledge on solving differential equations

> leetcode is the SAT for coding, not perfect, but at least it's close to fair play.

It would be amazing if leetcode were like the SAT, and you could just get one good score and then never think about it again.

Anything like that would make it much lower-friction to switch between FAANGs (and friends), though, which I suspect is a big part of why they've settled on doing things this way.

That’s a fascinating idea. Get companies to accept some form of standardized testing and have it be transferable. That would greatly increase the motivation behind its studies I would presume.

I, for one, will probably never subject myself to a FAANG-type interview, but absolutely would study for and take a similar standardized test if it unlocked the same kind of opportunities, and I didn't have to re-take it with every interview.

This is a startup idea in fact, wait, someone is doing that: https://codesignal.com is one that I just learned yesterday, but it's not 'standardized' like what SAT does.

In fact I believe software should have some qualification tests, e.g. general coding, database, cloud computing, etc. Like CPA for accountants. Each test should be valid for a few years in each category.

The hard part's not creating some kind of certification, it's getting desirable employers to accept it as a replacement for the most-painful parts of their interview processes. I suspect a lot of top companies don't want to make it easier to jump between them.

The "most painful" part of any interview process is just the part that you happen to be the worst at. Personally, I don't find leetcode to be painful at all and would be much more enthusiastic about something that eliminates any part of the interview where you have to talk about yourself.

What's the problem with talking about yourself? You can just memorize a few sentences since the questions are always the same.

Yeah, witness Triplebyte's lack of success in getting companies to use them as a substitute for anything more than the initial phone technical screen.

Sure it's a great idea and hiring culture would be so much better if it happened, but I think the parent is correct that companies want friction at that point. None of them want to make it easier for talent to jump ship and transfer.

you could even call it certification!

Certification is generally binary, though - you're either certified or you're not. This might be a good thing though, as it establishes a decent floor for technical competency and can save everyone from having to deal with at least some of the technical interview nonsense.

What some of the people in these comments seem to want though is some sort of standardized score/ranking system, which I suspect might lead to even more nightmarish outcomes than the current leetcode-y interview processes. (e.g. Employers setting absurdly high cutoff scores, choosing one applicant over another because simply because they scored a couple points higher, applicants grinding unimaginable amounts of unpaid hours to bump up their scores a bit, etc.)

I've done first party certification and it was always a joke -- they need you to pass so you can get your employer to use their services. Are there trusted third party certification services that are willing to fail half or more of their customers?

true, the keyword is 'standardized' at national level, even 'global' level.

You're going to hear complaints about bias in selecting the types of problems.

for SAT or GRE, my understanding is they have a huge pool of problems, before the test they're picked and assembled somehow. I hear no one complains about SAT or GRE selections of problems, so it might be less of a concern.

I can't tell if you are being facetious or not. I hope you are being facetious. I really do.

As many other comments have indicated right here on Hacker News, professional licenses are commonplace for occupations such as plumbers, electricians, doctors, lawyers, and even many types of engineers.

I suppose that central governments (such as the US federal government) should offer licenses for myriad types of software engineers, hardware engineers, software architects, hardware engineers, and so on.

Wouldn't it help companies if they could choose to interview only candidates who were licensed as, say, a level three penetration tester (intermediate penetration tester) or a level five database architect (expert database architect)?

The whole "Let's reinvent the wheel mentality" surrounding software, The Internets, and hardware simultaneously bemuses and frightens me.

"The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." King Solomon, Ecclesiastes.

and

"I only wish that wisdom were the kind of thing that flowed ... from the vessel that was full to the one that was empty." Plato, Symposium

Why don't we simply allow unqualified, blind, inebriated people to drive automobiles on public roads at whatever speed they would like? Why don't we let a guy who watched a bunch of YouTube videos call himself a brain surgeon, and perform brain surgery on people who don't even need brain surgery in the first place? Hey, wait, i've gotta gureaat idear: y botherr haviing aany ruuules at al! Sheesh.

Without rules, men simply return to a state of nature where life is short, brutish, and mean (Hobbes).

I just found this on Google...

****** Origin of Life is Nasty, Brutish, and Short

This expression comes from the author Thomas Hobbes, in his work Leviathan, from the year 1651. He believed that without a central government, there would be no culture, no society, and it would seem like all men were at war with one another. ******

The “Wild West” mentality of folks who seem to believe that rugged individualists (not federal agencies such as the US Department of Defense) built Silicon Valley, is perched atop the same type of popular, yet nonsensical, mythology (falsehood) as Horatio Alger's famous character who was actually named Ragged Dick. (Really, Ragged Dick was the character's name, I am not being facetious) who metaphorically pulled himself up by his bootstraps to rise from street urchin to CEO (who was a wealthy industrialist).

Imagine a military, any military, anywhere, anytime in human history, that didn't have ranks, titles, and gasp... tests which members had to pass to move up the ranks. How well do you suppose a military without ranks and without tests would fare in combat? Obviously, such as military would be in a state of hopeless disarray.

Licenses are not a necessary evil; they are a good, and proper way to identify and reward qualified professionals, while simultaneously enabling "the rest of us" to know, for example, who's a mere private, whom we can walk past without batting an eye, and who's a colonel, whom must stop and salute.

Imagine a hiring manager say, "Hey, this kid never went to college, but he's a freshly minted level one software engineer, I say we bring him in for an interview."

Why should every company need to create their own initial screening tests? Imagine a trucking company that needs to hire a truck driver with a particular type of commercial driver's license (CDL). In the employment advertisements they post, such companies almost invariably include verbiage such as, "Class A CDL required" or "Must have a Class B CDL." See? The candidate must have already passed an initial screening test, by acquiring a particular type of license, prior to being granted an interview.

This is obviously a huge benefit to both candidates and companies alike because it saves both sides a lot, and I mean, a lot, a lot, a lot... of time!

These days it is comically inane that tech candidates are normally expected to take an endless stream of initial screening tests to prove their mettle to each and every prospective employer (unless they were referred, famous, or for some other reason exempted from the requirement).

Imagine a CPA (certified public accountant) being required to pass a basic auditing test before he was granted an interview for a new job. Why would a company ask a CPA to take such a test? If a candidate is a CPA, then (unless, for example, he cheated on his CPA test, or suffered some sort of memory loss) he has already proven that he has a substantial amount of knowledge about auditing.

Yes, of course companies should administer their own tests. But professionals licenses can, and do, enable both candidates and companies to avoid the sort of initial screening test which companies commonly require of software engineering candidates. Currently initial screening tests, such as LeetCode, are a response by hiring companies that are typically deluged with a sea of unlicensed (and almost entirely unqualified) candidates, all of whom claim to be qualified.

Nice rant. It’s full of logical holes, of course, as there’s no common definition of tech roles and their titles, let alone a common understanding of the included tasks.

There are React Boot Camp folks who can whip up a frontend in no time who are arguably more competent at this task than a PhD in Comp Sci, and there are PhDs in Comp Sci who never wrote a lick of code in their life.

Technology in software IS Political, and 30 years of development experience shows me various parallel worlds that are arguably better than our current one.

Someone who grew up coding and loves hacking as close to the bare metal as possible is worth more than a dozen of your certified software engineers.

Let me know when the world standardizes on a Comp “Sci” curriculum.

Actual computational science has very little to do with computers and software development, which is a thesis statement I will be happy to support if pressed. For now, I end my rant

> but at least it's close to fair play

How is it fair, it favors young graduates and people with lots of time to prepare tremendously. Would it seem sensible to you that every time a doctor applied for a job, even if he has 20 years of experience, he'd need to compete with recent medical school graduates on some first year medical school exam?

Because people are under the impression that it's illegal. That and I think a lot of people will make its use be about race, so people avoid it.

I was just entertaining OP, I don't think IQ correlates that well to SW engineering job performance. It's only one of many many factors (albeit probably the easiest thing to test for - testing curiousity, emotional intelligence, motivation, work ethic and resilience is much much harder).

But if we're saying Leetcode is simply testing for IQ and not really for software engineering ability, why not just test for IQ? IQ tests are designed in a way that after a certain threshold it's pretty hard to improve in them - they actually test some innate ability. Leetcode tests how well you are prepared for Leetcode, and perhaps how well you do under stress. It correlates only slightly with intelligence and even less slightly with programming ability.

I think the fact that leetcode needs to be studied incorporates work ethic/motivation/resilience alongside IQ. Also, at some stage in the interview process you have to interact with people which will expose your social skills/emotional intelligence to some degree.

Bad optics

And algorithmic questions are a straightforward way to get a scalable, structured interview round. It's difficult to entirely replace algorithmic rounds with questions that are both scalable and structured.