at least the rules are clear, and the interviewers/recruiter are usually pretty nice. There are cooler things to do for personal development, especially when you already have a demanding job.īut well, that's part of the game. It's not uninteresting but after you solve 500 problems, it starts to get uninspiring. Also the whole thing seems pretty random.Īlso practicing leetcode feels like wasted time. It feels like they will favor a candidate who can solve leetcode problems a little bit faster to someone who is a more experienced SWE. OSS and tons of github projects, blog or scientific articles, things written by me they could actually check). What leaves me with a bitter taste is that they don't seem to value the experience on my resume (e.g. They always tell me it was very close (or even that I passed, but they didn't find a team in the following month and asked me to reapply). I spent a lot of time practicing leetcode, interviewed a bunch of times (4 times, about 25 technical interviews) at FAANG without getting an offer. But we keep doing these algorithms exercises because they require such little effort or interaction from engineers who are doing this interview in between two meetings with no prep time.
You go back and look at a similar implementation in your code base for a template instead of coding from memory.Īnd that's a shame because the live coding exercise is both a better predictor of hands-on job success and it's a better recruiting tactic: you've just had a vulnerable, collaborative experience with someone who will actually be working with you on a regular basis and you get a sense of whether you'd actually like to work there. You have to look up (for the 5000th time in your career) whether you should be using Array.slice or Array.splice in this case. You ask a candidate to code a toy problem, and the candidate either knows the "trick" to solving it quickly or they don't - very little risk for you as the interviewer, you're just watching things play out.īut if your interview requires you to pair program on real code like you'll do in your actual job, it opens up a lot of room to look dumb in front of an interviewee.
One of the big unspoken reasons these questions stick around: they cause little imposter syndrome anxiety for the senior engineers who need to conduct the interview.