Comment by bgro
3 days ago
I’ve been pointing to Google Maps, drive as specific but not the complete set of fantastic innovation we saw around ~2007 for how great developers used to be.
I think the drift is specifically tied to the introduction of leetcode in the interview process. Which may sound like a wild connection at first but I’ve now lived through being blocked and seeing how creative devs can’t get through leetcode gatekeepers who are microfussing and blanket critiquing devs as bad when they don’t have leetcode answers pre memorized in a mental hasmap to be able to regurgitate from memory which allows the extra mental capacity to free up in order to hold a performative class lecture about it at the same time.
You can spend your time memorizing the test taking skills to be good at tests. Maybe memorize the answers too. Or you can be coming up with grand ideas like maps and street view and thinking about how all these things in the world come together to be able to do that.
Not many are good at both and the entire stack of people doing interviews is currently blocked at fixing this. Nobody wants to have wasted their time memorizing leetcode to just not gatekeep people who didn’t put in “the same effort,” and no hiring team wants to gamble on somebody who fails the leetcode test processes and turns out to be the occasional bad hire with the only paperwork saying they didn’t pass the industry standard test and shouldn’t have gotten hired in the first place.
So we’re now blocked with only slop workers getting hired who don’t feel the same comfort to take big risks and we get slop like Microsoft notepad plus copilot 365 as a result.
Was leetcode-style interviewing not a thing before that? Cracking the coding interview was published in 2008 so I would assume it was already quite established by then.
I would argue that back then leetcode-style interviews probably filtered for the real talent Google was looking for (and that made possible many things). Then companies started cargo-culting it and people started gaming the system.
I wasn’t a dev at the time but in my research of how we got here, Google started with more abstract mental discovery questions.
Then people got frustrated on both ends because some people got through it by just BSing, and people who lack any creative or big idea processing coming from the Microsoft Outlook team I imagine couldn’t comprehend a connection between abstract question discussion vs solving a math test. So they whined and threw a temper tantrum until the process was based around dev work (leetcode) but the Google abstract discussion was still the key part of the interview; you didn’t need to literally solve the leetcode question perfectly.
Then you needed to solve the leetcode question perfectly because people who BSed through that process by knowing just enough to mislead interviewers snuck in and turned out to be toxic employees. So you have to get the question 100% correct, character for character, or it’s wrong and you’re a toxic bad dev. But what if you memorize that question—- they’re all posted online now (thus defeating the purpose of it being an abstract discussion centered around programming)…. Well using statistics we’ll just determine that getting past 5-10 of them in a row is acceptable odds. And just in case that’s not good enough, we’ll have multiple prison guards in every interview. Each round new guards. If any guard doesn’t pass you for any reason or for no reason then you’re out.
Then people started writing books about this, making videos about it, selling courses. While they work at FAANG. They’re the ones interviewing so they can get you through the interview if you buy their course. Of course they’re not going to want to get rid of the process they’ve spent years mastering and make more money on the side than their full time Google job. If they had to grind and get past the first guards who asked light silly questions, why can’t you get through hardcore legendary no respawn no tools timed trial elite 4 group panel lecture interviews. It’s literally identical to what they went through right?
Even still, it was relatively justifiable for Google who had a legitimate reason to use masters of programming who could live-invent answers to these without using a mental hashmap lookup of answers. They can solve problems fast and make things scalable for big internet work.
But now that every company is cloning that, they’re picking and choosing to “improve” off of Google’s hiring process. Why should we settle for Google’s engineers when our shoe company website can do better. Fixed the flaw in Google’s process where there’s a discussion about your thought process by just fully automating the process. Live monitor solve 10 leetcode problems on your own time and if it’s not an exact character match then it’s wrong and you’re blacklisted.
New hires getting in can’t even get their foot in the door to begin to have an opportunity to invent Google Maps. All time that would have gone to exploring ideas like that now has to go to memorizing leetcode and basic day to day survival with every layer of badly cloned bloat like Agile Scrum meetings where the project manager is screaming at devs when they point a story “wrong.” Despite every sprint for the past 3 years not being able to complete because everyody’s overloaded. Google does it so we just cloned what they’re doing and made it better and the lazy devs are sandbagging. Just imagine how bad it would be if we DIDN’T use leetcode. Thank god the CFO introduced leetcode and personally sits in every engineer interview to let us know when they’re fake bad devs.
My first job, in California, was just transitioning to leetcode-style interviews in 2007 following the industry trend. So it was probably spreading around that time.