leetcode == smart ? oO that's new

I interview many candidates at FAANG, I can easily tell the ones that have prep by just doing leetcode and the ones that knows the shit.

I couldn't care less if you can solve all kinds of complex dynamic programming challenges.

I ask coding questions that you won't find in leetcode and requires problem solving skill and good craft.

And this is because I do like working with smart people and not with people good at memorizing patterns.

I consider solving technical challenges in interview the "LC style" interview as compared with talking about your past experience or language trivia grab bag. I am not saying literally ask questions found on leetcode.com

I think it is easier to know the shit to do LC interviews than somehow memorizing the question bank. I haven't seen many people succeed who were unskilled but managed to just memorize the questions.

so how come that I find a good chunk of swe at FAANG are not that smart, and barely get anything done. Plus the quality of their work (generally speaking) is very low compared to what one would expect. And this is true across the board, it is a recurring theme when talking with peers.

I think LC style interview have ruined the interview process in the tech industry.

Note: I do ask candidates to code during the interview, but I ask things that are related to real problem, some of which, I had to solve in my day-to-day.

In addition, I put a lot of emphasis on how well they articulate their thought process, and the quality of their craft.

Also, I would not discount `past experience talk` that easily. Actually I use that to drill down in their resume to better understand their real contribution. More often than not, people just lie. They are very easy to spot. At that point is game over. I don't care if you nailed the coding. If you lie and oversell yourself you are done.

Another thing that I find very annoying is that very often interview are conducted by junior engineer, and they don't have imo the maturity and experience to properly assess candidate skills and potential. You either do well according to what their expected solution is, or you are out.

Interviewing is not just a binary process coding well yes/not. It is a little more involved.

I passed candidates that did not do well on coding, but I was convinced they had potential. Whereas I did not pass candidate that did very well on coding, but did not show any interest or passion at all.

> so how come that I find a good chunk of swe at FAANG are not that smart

You put the bar wherever you want. A company can decide to set it lower than what you would expect or like, but it could still make business sense, e.g. if 99%+ of hires still perform well with this bar and the company would like to hire faster.

This is related to:

> and barely get anything done. Plus the quality of their work (generally speaking) is very low

That's a problem of the performance review process. If everybody considers that someone is not delivering, that could be for multiple reasons, and even with a very high hiring bar that could still happen, so you can't rely solely on interviews.

If you don't have a good performance review process, you'll end up with worse hiring because you can't measure the impact of your changes.

> I passed candidates that did not do well on coding, but I was convinced they had potential. Whereas I did not pass candidate that did very well on coding, but did not show any interest or passion at all.

Can you do that objectively? It's very easy to introduce bias if you try to evaluate whether candidates show passion.

I like this kind of answer. You are trying to be the leetcode alternative, which I fully support. I have previously written on HN about my most common interview programming question: "Please implement the classic C function atoi() in any language of your choice. Do not use built-in string-to-number functions." This question has a lot of edge cases, but it is simple enough to program on whiteboard, paper, text editor, weird-IDE-that-I-never-used-before-this-interview(!). The questions that people ask and how they explain their solution says a lot about them as engineers.

i would call that leetcode style i guess i have a broader interpretation than what most people have in mind. it's more easily memorized IMO than traditional leetcode - atoi and std::string class are very common questions nowadays.

The backlash is the same as the one against standardized testing methods in school. People that don’t fit the mold of the testing method will fail regardless of how competent they are at their actual job.

It’s good you like that I suppose, but it sounds absolutely bonkers to me.

> don’t fit the mold of the testing method will fail regardless of how competent they are at their actual job.

The mold being answering questions about their supposed area of expertise.

I think people really like to claim that they are misunderstood geniuses who just don't fit the mold of being able to answer questions about the things they know. I have no doubt that such people exist, but I would not want to scrap an evaluation system simply because it doesn't catch every possible person, more important to me is keeping bad people out.

> keeping bad people out

you seem very confident about that. In my experience LC/FAANG style interview don't keep bad people out.

Do they keep all bad people out? No.

But I have never encountered a company that doesn't have a on-the-spot technical interview (involving coding or math) that has had more success keeping bad engineers out than FAANG.

ah right, leetcode interviews are a woke/politically correct practice promulgated by fake talented FAANG engineers to keep out the real salt of the earth SWEs who know how to do real work.

it's fascinating how these playbooks can recycle themselves in any number of scenarios. yes, conditioning on being an engineer at FAANG you are much more likely to get a better engineer, I'm not going to apologize for saying the truth.

e: not going to keep replying, I seem to recall getting in previous fruitless arguments with you when you suggested banning renting was the way out of California's housing crisis.

> I am arguing that LC/FAANG interview does not do a better job at filtering them out.

You're talking of gigantic tech companies that actually have a business interest in getting that right and you just assume that haven't done any studies about that. If you want to argue they're wrong, fine, but the money is against you on this, so more proof and arguments would be welcome.

I think we all agree that no interview process is perfect, but you're basically claiming that they're all equally bad.

I guess Sergey and Larry weren't "smart" then because they never went through a leetcode interview.

If you think what I just said implies what you just said, then you are the type of person I would not want to work with.