Comment by Apocryphon
14 hours ago
> the point is to understand how the candidate thinks, communicates, and decomposes problems
Interviewers always say this, but consider: would you endorse a candidate who ultimately is unable to solve the problem you've presented them, even if they think, communicate, and decompose problems well? No interview in this industry prizes those things over getting the answer right.
Note how I structure my problem solving questions to be progressive and adjustable, both up and down. This gives me room to simplify and get the candidate to a place where they can show me something (candidates who truly come up goose eggs on everything functional but still show solid fundamentals may be showing that the interview is for the wrong job family). It also means that it is virtually impossible to get all the way to "the end" and "finish" the problem, as I leave room for extension and modification. I had one question that I thought was long enough, and, of maybe ~120 interviews with it, exactly two people dunked on it, one writing out code for solutions with and without libraries. That guy was a complete jerk, and I wasn't at all surprised when the entire panel came back not-inclined.
My first boss (a CTO at a start-up) drilled this into us. What you know is far less valuable than how you learn/think and how you function on a team.
Interesting. Sounds like you and other HN commentators from firms that interview better than the industry Leetcode convention oughta be on one of those workplace lists on GitHub (like this one: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards) for applicants who want to go through a more interesting process.
Every interview I know is severely time limited. I don't care if you can solve the problem, so long as your are clearly making progress and have proven you could solve the problem if given longer.
Now I give you problems I expect to take 20 minutes if you have never seen them before so you should at least solve 1. I have more than once realized someone was stuck on the wrong track and redirection efforts were not getting them to a good track so I switched to a different problem which they were then able to solve. I've also stopped people when they have 6 of 10 tests passing because it is clear they could get the rest passing but I wouldn't learn anything more so it wasn't worth wasting their time.
In the real world I'm going to give people complex problems that will take days to solve.