
Ask HN: Getting a Job Without Leetcode? - sriracha_py
As the title implies, is it possible in this day and age to find a software engineering job without grinding LeetCode?<p>Is work experience and personal side projects not enough?<p>I understand that we as engineers must follow the the tide of the industry and adapt to its current and future challenges. But spending time outside of work to &quot;practice&quot; these style of questions leaves a sour taste in my mouth.<p>Any advice is welcome.
======
rmbryan
What do you see as the set of differences between "LeetCode" and the coding
style you prefer?

------
davismwfl
To answer your question yes, plenty of very good positions can be had without
being treated like a trained monkey trying to regurgitate memorized material
that once you get a job will be useless again for 2-3 years till you apply for
a new position again.

Smart employers and good interviewers will spend time with you, ask you hard
questions, get to the bottom of what you know and don't know without asking
you to spend hours writing some useless piece of code, or giving you
algorithmic problems for a job that will rarely if ever use them. That said,
just because I dislike leetcode style interviews and take home problems
doesn't mean I dislike hard questions, tough problems and figuring out how you
think. I just think it is highly disrespectful and frankly discriminatory
against experienced people to ask them to spend hours writing code as part of
an interview process or answering questions which the entire industry knows
people have to study for to get pass. I call it discriminatory because anyone
with a life, family etc can't sacrifice the 4-6 hours for each employer x
maybe 10-15 employers they applied to and are working through the process on.
Not to mention the 1-2 months of study time just to pass a "test" that won't
do anything but get them to the next reviewer as sorry it won't improve their
job skills overall. So it is gamed for the young, fresh out of school
engineers because they are typically single (hence lots of free time), still
in the study mode and they don't know better how disrespectful an employer is
being when they won't give you the time of day till you swing from branch to
branch like a good monkey.

I am a prior founder and a current CTO for a startup, and I absolutely do not
allow these types of interviews, I also happen to have been writing
professional code since the early 90's and lived through the dot com days when
people thought this style of interviewing was good (me included btw) until we
learned it gave us smart people but not people who could deliver products or
solve real problems. So for my interviews and how I train people to conduct
interviews. We focus on learning who you are, what you bring to the table and
that if you joined you will elevate the team both technically and culturally.
That means, you will get asked hard technical questions, you will get tough
scenarios to think through, but you will do that with someone on the team at
all times and you are free to ask us questions to help you. We will not give
you a useless test and say if you can pass this then we will talk to you. No,
that's crap. We will ask you how to talk through real world problems, for
example, we will ask you what data structures you would use for a given
scenario and why, we will ask you what the consequences of those choices are,
and we will collaboratively see if we can work through problems together. I
don't care if you can write a perfect line of code or most optimized loop in
whatever language, I care that you know what to write and when. Because with
that knowledge you'll figure out how to do it in any language you know or
learn.

Please also don't misunderstand me, I think people are using the leetcode
style not out of intentional disrespect but out of a lack of training &
understanding of how to properly conduct interviews and find out what someone
knows and is good at. It seems logical to them, they give you a problem today
and you come back to them in a couple of days when you have solved it,
shouldn't take you more than a few hours they say. Yet the reality is the
message this interviewer is sending is that you are not important enough to
talk to until you can jump this high, and oh, btw the height of the stick is
relative to what the interviewer thinks is good but you don't know the
interviewer so good luck with your guess. The interviewer sees it as a way to
weed through lots of resumes and only talk to those who are "serious", but in
the end they just eliminate most of the best candidates that have experience
and self respect because someone with experience and self respect knows a good
interviewer.

I really cannot stress enough, it is not that I don't believe in hard
questions, I just believe it has to be done in a way that is conducive to
learning about the candidate, and you cannot do that in a leet style code
interview or in take home tests. I don't care what you think you know, the
only way to learn about the candidate is to respectfully talk to them like an
intelligent colleague and see what they know and don't know.

