With all those leetcode acers, why is software slow as molasses? You would think they pattern match for the most efficient algo with all this training.
In my experience the more impressive somebody is at leet code, the worse their production code. Full of bugs, no error handling. Assuming the inputs never stray from the happy path.
Not saying it's always the case of course. But I did interview almost 400 people over my career.
On the other hand, most people cannot code to save their life. So I have no answers. Only more questions.
> In my experience the more impressive somebody is at leet code, the worse their production code.
Used to think this too, until I met some truly impressively bad engineers where I'm pretty sure they would not have passed a leetcode screen either. People acing leetcode is at the minimum a good signal for people having the patience to sit down and learn non-trivial things over a somewhat longer time period by themselves.
After getting good at it, there is no "additional" prep time, unlike take homes, where you would need to spend hours for every individual assignment. Is that so hard to understand?
Do you know the "use it or loose it" phrase? How long do you stay good at leetocde to not require anymore prep whenever you interview again?
For some people, doing an AI assisted take home might take less time than having to restudy and re-exercise leetcode for months which they won't use again. Plus a lot of people suck at live coding when put on the spot due to anxiety, which means even more time investment for something not related to work.
>Is that so hard to understand?
I understood just fine, I'm calling it out as being incorrect for a lot of people.
Interviews need to give signal to the employer. Having a couple decades experience now, working high scale, highly available services, and having designed interviews for thousands of candidates and given hundreds of interviews across half a dozen software engineering orgs, leetcode is poor signal.
Good signals comes from questions that uncover attributes that will grow your team snd fill deficits.
The best method yet for a technical interview is a work sample test based on recent work actually performed by the team. I've never encountered a leetcode problem in the wild. Data structures and algorithms, of course. Leetcode? Nope.
But leetcode is easy to administer and someone else already wrote the question. The big companies don't even try to differentiate between those who clearly have practiced the given leetcode problem type vs someone who derives a solution by working the problem.
yes agreed leetcode as interview technqiue sucks but its great for interviewers. i am just a powerless cog playing the game trying to provide for my family.
Get good at it and you can do hundreds of interviews with no prep.
Take homes are a proxy for hiring most desperate ppl who can spend most time on it.