Comment by MarcelOlsz
16 hours ago
5 years ago you'd have a project like that, talk to someone at a company for like 30m-1hr about it, and then get an offer.
16 hours ago
5 years ago you'd have a project like that, talk to someone at a company for like 30m-1hr about it, and then get an offer.
Did you mean to type 25? 5 years ago LC challenge were as, if not more, prevalent than they are today. And a single interview for a job is not something I have seen ever after 15 years in the space (and a bunch of successful OSS projects I can showcase).
I actually have the feeling it’s not as hardcore as it used to be on average. E.g. OpenAI doesn’t have a straight up LC interview even though they probably are the most sought after company. Google and MS and others still do it, but it feel like it has less weight in the final feedback than it did before. Most en-vogue startup have also ditched it for real world coding excercices.
Probably due to the fact that LC has been thoroughly gamed and is even less a useful signal than it was before.
Of course some still do, like Anthropic were you have to have a perfect score to 4 leetcode questions, automatically judged with no human contact, the worst kind of interview.
There's an entire planet of jobs that have nothing to do with leetcode. I was talking about those, not FAANG stuff. Unfortunately I am not FAANG royalty.
>Of course some still do, like Anthropic were you have to have a perfect score to 4 leetcode questions, automatically judged with no human contact, the worst kind of interview.
Should be illegal honestly.
5 years ago non-FAANG companies were fully in leetcode mode for interviews. Maybe 10-15 years ago you could totally avoid it without much problem.
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It might be illegal; certainly if you can show that LC is biased against a protected class, then there would be grounds for a lawsuit.
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> Should be illegal honestly.
I can't imagine this kind of entitlement. If you don't want to work for them, don't study leetcode. If you want to work for them (and get paid tons of money), study leetcode. This isn't a difficult aristotelian ethics/morals question.
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I literally got my first real job 26 years ago by talking about my game engine, for a fintech firm.
Not sure if that's a typo. 5 years ago was also pretty LC-heavy.
Ten years ago it was more based on Cracking the Coding Interview.
So i'd guess what you're referring to is even older than that.
Talking about general jobs not FAANG adjacent.
Nearly everyone is FAANG adjacent
Apart from those companies where social capital counts for more ...
I rarely apply for or interview at FAANG or adjacent companies...
I read this, and intentionally did not read the replies below. You are so wrong. You can write a library, even an entirely new language from scratch, and you will still be denied employment for that library/language.
> 5 years ago you'd have a project like that, talk to someone at a company for like 30m-1hr about it, and then get an offer.
Based on my own experiences, that was true 25 years ago. 20 years ago, coding puzzles were now a standard part of interviewing, but it was pretty lightweight. 5 years ago (covid!) everything was leet-code to get to the interview stage.
I have been getting grilled on leet code style questions since the beginning my of my career over 12 years ago.
The faangs jump and then the rest of the industry does some dogshit imitation of their process
I'm lucky I'm in the frontend webdev sphere then I guess instead of like being a pure backend guy. I've had a couple of those live ones and just denied them. I did manage to implement a "snake" algorithm once but got denied because I wasn't able to talk about time/space complexity.
As someone who’s hired 10s of engineers across multiple companies, it’s bullshit on the hiring side too.
It was humbling having to explain to fellow adult humans that when your test question is based on an algorithm solving a real business problem that we work on every day, a random person is not going to implement a solution in one hour as well as we can.
I’ve seen how the faangs interview process accounts for those types of bias and mental blindness and are actually effective, but their solutions require time and/or money so everywhere I’ve been implements the first 80% that’s cheap and then skips on the rest that makes it work
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