I disagree. Leetcode is less representative of your job than code review on a PR. Code reviews are an every day activity that can easily cause outages.

What's your argument that code reviews aren't a good representation of skills?

I’m sure you’re familiar with the arguments and don’t believe them. So I’ll just say this:

clearly a code review is an easier task, and so provides a weaker signal.

Reciting all x86-64 opcodes and their possible encodings from memory is even more difficult, so it must be an even stronger signal. Why not test programmers solely on this essential knowledge? It’s almost unavoidable that their code will execute on an Intel/AMD CPU at some point, so it’s best to filter for programmers who have the strongest grasp of the fundamentals.

Easy to refute that. That test gives you 0 every time you run it. Leet code gives a 1 10-20% of the time.

If you let people know that they can get a $300k job by memorizing x86-64 opcodes, you will start getting >0 pass rates on this test. It’s a given.

When people have time to prepare for the test and the incentives are high enough, you only get what you measure. The leetcode fans don’t seem to understand this.

If that’s true then a large number of candidates should be passing leet code tests, right?

As someone who hires a ton of engineers, I wholeheartedly disagree with this.

I actually really like this concept. The main benefit is that this approach allows a more conversational interview and also allows to cover a broader range of real-world problems.

There is almost 0 correlation between candidates ability to be effective collaborator and their ability to solve leet code problems. The former is a lot more important to us than your ability to chew out code.

More than that: a lot of candidates who are good at leetcode challenges are good at them because they specifically practice them.

Does this translate to creative problem solving and thinking? To productivity when encountering novel tasks? To being a good teammate? There is a stronger correlation with "having free time" and "solving leetcode" than being a great engineering teammate, IMO.

That’s been addressed. Practice vs Iq is possible but rare and represents skin in the game.

If you don’t think it shows problem solving, why would you prefer a test that involves no writing or creation?

Reading is very practicable m. and there is an issue that you can’t evaluate someone smarter than you.

I think many companies using Leetcode are doing so because they don't know how to hire engineers, so they're outsourcing the problem to Leetcode. In that respect, those same companies are unlikely to think through interviewing enough to choose a tool like this.

    > ...are doing so because they don't know how to hire engineers

I agree with this. I think teams no longer know how to actually select and filter good engineers so they spend multiple weeks filtering candidates using take homes, live assessments, followups, panel interviews, and so on because it's what everyone else does.

Instead, this approach tends to yield the "least worst" candidate; the ones that have the time to waste going through a 3 week interview process.

The take home is the most egregious. I think that the solution is rather simple: what would knock your socks off if you saw it in a submission to a take home? Could you design 2-3 questions that would get right to that scenario and test for that output? It seems like it would be a far more efficient use of time.

I wrote a followup blog post on this: https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2023/10/your-interview-process-is-...

Completely agree, they aren’t really in the market.

I'd say sadly it is almost the inverse.

It's the companies that hire really high volumes that I see resort to leet code tests as sort of a great filter.

I rarely see small companies use leet code interviews, but that does not say much about the rest of their interview quality.