Jesus Christ: Where are you interviewing? This sounds more like Stephen King's The Long Walk, than a job interview! Do they hold a gun to your head while you regurtitate the optimal solution?

Have you interviewed recently? The vast majority of companies won't even have a conversation with you until after you've jumped through this.

fwiw in my experience it's entirely possible to avoid this if you don't submit an application "cold" (i.e. through the careers page), but through a recruiter or referral _IF_ you have a strong portfolio of open source work and/or exposure in technical spaces.

i'm more than happy to do take-home assignments or complete reasonable timed assessments, but i have (politely) refused to complete leetcode-style gotcha screens when they have been presented to me as "just another part of the application process".

idk, though. maybe that's a privileged statement based on my position, but from what i can tell grinding leetcode seems to be much less reliable these days & the toll it takes on a lot of folks is pretty significant.

I have but haven't had anyone ask me leetcode questions yet. Everyone's just been asking about my precious jobs. I also have an ok amount of public projects, maybe that's why?

If someone asked my to do a leetcode style problem I'd politely refuse, and likely end the interview. I went through that kind of job hunt at the expense of my mental health and confidence in myself as an engineer once. It was one of the most degrading experiences of my life (so in all not a bad life to be fair). I'll never do it again.

Previous jobs*

This would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

When people started asking these questions, the whole point was to see how people reason about a new problem they haven't solved before. There are almost no work problems that require you to regurgitate something verbatim you saw on leetcode before.

It's seriously making me question the intelligence of these interviewers. Although at the same time I realize it's mainly just to arbitrarily whittle down the applicant pool to a smaller number you can interview in person.

it is very sad. i personally would much rather someone walks through their problem solving approach and identifies shortcomings/edge cases than to regurgitate a memorized algorithm.

it's really easy to identify code that is not optimal at code review time. it is far more challenging to have a conversation with a algorithm-regurgitating robot that their entire approach was wrong because they misunderstood the abstraction or that their code wasn't needed because Larry is refactoring that part of the system to a separate service already.

Yup. It's absolutely crazy to me to see the amount of people who are apparently doing hiring telling others here in the comments (and elsewhere on HN, etc) that they should "grind leetcode" while also NOT admitting that this is absolutely stupid. Like I'll give you a pass as an interviewer / hiring manager if your hands are unfortunately tied and you can't change your companies hiring processes.

But if you're an interviewer or hiring manager who is telling people to "grind leetcode" because you legitimately believe this is a good way to find good talent ... you need your head examined. All you're doing is filtering for people who've grinded leetcode long enough to memorize solutions. This has ZERO correlation to software development ability.

Appreciate you putting these words together. More employers need to hear it.

Especially today with Copilot and GPT-4, if I need to merge two sorted lists with optimal time complexity, I'll just ask GPT-4 and it'll give me the leetcode-optimal solution adapted to my language and variable names. Leetcode is less relevant than it has ever been.

That is fascinating. I wouldn't even show up for an interview if they told me to prepare for that kind of exam. What kinds of companies are these and where are they located? Sounds like an interview designed by an omega nerd nightmare boss.

If you view the list here: https://leetcode.com/problemset/all/ you will see the questions tagged by company (there is a paid option as well). If they have a name you know, they probably do this style of interview.

I don't understand what I'm looking at. Who is tagging companies? Why would leetcode know the specific questions people are being asked to whiteboard?

People who interview at these companies report on their interview experience. It's true, these leetcode style questions do get asked and not just by the FAANG companies but lots of much smaller, no-name companies as well.

Yes, you can certainly find companies out there that don't interview in this way, but leetcode interviews are extremely common.

Strange. Not something I've seen, but I'm also very picky about the companies that I have applied to in the past–to the point of picking specific people I want to work with–and never ever go after mega orgs (I've contracted with some of them, and that's enough to know to stay away). Seems like a practice that would actually bias in favor of more junior developers, because of the emphasis on speed and familiarity to CS classwork. Obviously some programming jobs are heavy on algorithms, but that's neither the case for most roles nor what typically sets apart senior developers from juniors.