When companies want a fully algorithmic way to filter for signal, it’s not because we think it’s a great process, but because it’s one of the only viable processes.
PLEASE explain to me what value leetcode-type questions provide over what good of a software engineer someone is!
Would that piece of information be helpful to you as you consider which candidates to invite to the first round of interviews? That is why companies do it.
A candidate who got 2 or 3 solved in 90 minutes is very likely to do much better on the rest of the interview and on the job than someone who couldn't solve any.
(I think a lot of people who can write code have a difficult time imagining just how many people both can't write code and apply for seemingly every posted SWE job listing.)
Haha. Hiring people is a job in and of itself. It needs a good eye for detail and intuition.
People are weird. Some days they write great code and hardly any serious bugs. Other days they need to look up a for-loop on MDN.
Here's simple task that I ask on interviews: write JavaScript function which works like setTimeout and uses setTimeout internally but provides a Promise result so it can be awaited. Very few people can write that kind of code. They actually have no idea what Promise is. They want to get in frontend position. How can you write frontend code if you have no idea what Promise is.
IMO this is absolutely crucial to understand about our industry, for programmers too, not just IT.
We're paid well because they can't avoid paying us well. But they don't want to let us in The Club of the actual professional or upper-middle class, in terms of perks and status (and, actually, pay in most of the industry, even in the US, doesn't quite rise to that level—$200k+ for mid-career-or-earlier isn't what most programmers see).
Frequent monitoring and things like open floorplan offices are part of that. High-status gets very little monitoring, and an office. There are tons of little things like this.
I think it may also be a minor reason our interviews are so god-awful (but I think the main reason is the huge players trying to reduce turnover to suppress the rate of wage increases).