Comment by noident
21 hours ago
I don't like doing the leetcode grind, but all of the alternatives are strictly worse.
* Take home projects filter out people with busy lives. Wastes 100 people's time to hire 1 person. Can't be sure they didn't cheat. No incentives to stop company from giving you a 10 hour assignment and then not looking at it. The candidate with the most time to waste wins.
* Relying on academic credentials unfairly favors people from privileged backgrounds and doesn't necessarily correlate with skill as an engineer.
* Skipping the tech interview and just talking about the candidate's experience is prone to favoring bullshitters, plus you'll miss smart people who haven't had their lucky break yet.
* Asking "practical" questions tends to eliminate people without familiarity with your problem domain or tech stack.
* We all know how asking riddles and brainteasers worked out.
With leetcode, the curriculum is known up front and I have some assurance that the company has at least has some skin in the game when they schedule an engineer to evaluate me. It also tests your general knowledge and in some part intelligence as opposed to testing that you have some very narrow experience that happens to overlap with the job description.
Its not good for the whole cohort of people who are good at their jobs and aren't good at leetcode.
You're filtering out people who don't have a lot of extra time on their hands to get good at one particular kind of puzzle.
Time poor people like parents, or people that are talented but busy in their current jobs.
I've spent a heck of a lot more time grinding leetcode than I have working on take-home projects. I always enjoyed doing take-home's because I could really spend time on it and make it something worth showing off - if anything it always felt like the perfect low-stress way to show what you can do. It's amazing how many candidates don't take the time to make it look good (or even meet the objectives in many cases).
Haven't done one since pre-LLM era though and that path seems like it might be completely infeasible for employers now.
That said, the most productive interviews I've been a part of as both employee and employer have always been with the technical people that you'll actually work with and conversational in nature. You can learn a lot about what someone knows by listening to their experiences and opinions (but this depends greatly on the quality of the interviewer)