And leetcode is not something you prep for once in your life, but every time you switch jobs.
So he did the three weeks, passed the leetcode, passed the interviews, and now makes 400k.
When I was 10 or 11, I asked my dad what MIT was looking for in a student application. He (an MIT alum) told me. I picked out the things I could do (being captain of the football team was never going to work for me), applied to MIT, and got rejected. But Caltech, Dartmouth and Johns Hopkins did admit me.
You do what you gotta do.
The biggest problem, of course, is that they also filtered qualified candidates (I personally got filtered out multiple times and I'd like to believe I was qualified!) But it is an understandable compromise whenever there is an extreme asymmetry in the volume of candidates and volume of interviewers, and the fix for that is simple: you study for the test (as you pointed out.)
Note also that as grandparent comment indicates, this test is a necessary but not sufficient condition; it's just to get your foot in the door for a deeper evaluation.
It's like "to get into Marine boot camp, there's a minimum crochet requirement".
Solving leetcode problems has nothing to do with commercial coding. It's an unrelated hoop that we make folks jump through, because it's easy to measure. It's like measuring developer productivity by LoC written.
Yes, it'll measure how much time the candidate spent preparing for the interview, and how well they can jump through hoops. But it'll also deter the actual people you want in the team, the folks who know that leetcode has nothing to do with commercial coding, and see the leetcode test as a sign that your organisation has no clue and a bad management culture.
It also reminds me of the "EE"s who carry around a card in their wallet with:
V = IR
I = V/R
R = V/I
> But it'll also deter the actual people you want in the team
All the FAANG companies do leetcode testing, so you can write off the high paying jobs.
I guess that staying as a valid test then - if a company uses leetcode for its interviews, it's probably somewhere I don't want to work.
People don't like Leetcode because it's insulting to treat them like freshmen that know nothing but algorithms that related poorly to the job at hand; can't judge them on coding prowesses, for most of them.
Wait, why am I explaining this to you like you're ready to listen beyond your monologue?
I have a friend who is a tech recruiter. There are an awful lot of frauds trying to land programming jobs. Hiring a fraud can cost a company a great deal of money. It shouldn't be any more insulting than applying for an accounting job and the employer does a routine background check to ensure that the candidate is not an embezzler, and not a drug addict.
I worked for a company that hired a coke addict. What a financial disaster that turned out to be.
Having a history of embezzlement or fraud is not in the same ballpark as struggling to whip up a DSA solution. One is a crime and one is a competence issue at best.
Too many frauds have managed to get degrees. I've worked with many of them. Degree'd engineers who cannot use a calculator, who cannot do basic geometry, etc.
If my Googling is correct, you will have chances to retake the strength test. Even if they only give you one try, you know exactly what is tested and can train to the point of near-certainty that you will pass, if your body is capable of it at all. (By contrast, leetcode doesn't care if you could learn a problem, it fails you for not figuring it out on a particular day with a particular interviewer.)
The best jobs can set an arbitrary high bar that loosely correlates with what they want, but it doesn't mean anyone who fails is unqualified to have any software job.
That's where studying it in advance comes in. Like for any test.
> but it doesn't mean anyone who fails is unqualified to have any software job.
It's pointless to argue absolutes when it comes to anything human. Filters do not have to be perfect to be effective.
For example, if I say "people like ice cream" and the pointless reply is "not everybody likes ice cream".
Indeed, but you're likely to end up a crappy for-profit degree mill that will be more of a negative signal than the positive one you wanted.
To get into college, there's the SAT test with a minimum score.
To get a high paying software job, there's the leetcode test.
These are gates meant to filter out the obviously unqualified candidates. Unqualified candidates waste the time of the candidate and the company. The real interview comes after that.