I continue to get puzzled with leetcode type things. Will coding exercises like this become obsolete someday or will the old guards continue to push for such things to be used during interviews? Today coding Copilots can easily replace leetcode "winners"
It replaced “did you go to a top university” and “do you know our exact stack and tools” as the top hiring practice. Now anyone can compete for the same jobs from anywhere in the world. It’s a leveller, in my mind.
I applied to Atlassian as a 50 year old from South Africa who has very broad and deep experience but has never worked in big tech. Failed at the last interview (of 5) but I found the process and feedback very fair and much better than others I’ve seen elsewhere. The focus was on collaboration and communication and not being a jerk, along with the problems to be solved. I enjoyed it.
The people / companies using it to hire will tend to hire people who studied leetcode.
The companies that don't use leetcode / don't use it as a strong signal will continue not using it.
In my opinion, leetcode is a poor signal if used as a binary decision ("were they right or wrong?"). The more important thing is communication and how they worked through the problem. I've heard this multiple places and I absolutely agree: attitude over aptitude. You can teach knowledge, you can't teach attitude or ability to problem solve.
The companies that use them as a strong signal are the ones that will be absolutely demolished in engineering because they are on a fast track for a staff full of rote memorization rather than strong creative problem solving. They'll be handicapped when it comes to solving problems that aren't covered by leetcode because no one there bothered to learn it.
> The companies that use them as a strong signal are the ones that will be absolutely demolished in engineering because they are on a fast track for a staff full of rote memorization rather than strong creative problem solving.
What metric are you using to measure this? I think its a positive correlation at best as far as good business outcomes are concerned, and maybe uncorrelated at worst. Google and Meta have been known to ask contrived puzzle questions for years, even before Leetcode (and Meta now is infamous for having a high standard for Leetcode interviews), and I do not see Engineering being "demolished" here, as far as results are concerned.
What people don't realize is that Leetcode selects for generally positive traits, no matter how its solved. In my mind, here are things LC selects for:
1. Actual innate skill. If someone never practiced leetcode before but can solve an arbitrary new coding question, they probably have a pretty decent aptitude for problem solving.
2. Determination. If someone practiced leetcode for hours a day just to pass an interview, thats commendable. Does it really matter that they don't "know" the problems if they studied hard and passed? They might be more likely to work hard on the job given the right rewards.
Leetcode style interviewes were basically initially created as a thinly veiled aptitude test, and in theory they are still good at that. If you _can't_ solve an easy to medium leetcode question then what does that say about you, assuming it basically is the inverse of the two singals above?
> I've heard this multiple places and I absolutely agree: attitude over aptitude. You can teach knowledge, you can't teach attitude or ability to problem solve.
Seems like society should try to figure this out.. if attitude is so important, why can’t we cultivate it systematically?
The way to cultivate it is letting people figure things out on their own and rewarding atypical solutions that arrive at the same conclusion.
A lot of education tries to deliver in a specific box and a specific way and any other method is punished. Society would likely get more value if education was more diverse in perspective and methods. It took me way too long to realize that I didn't care about anything but computers. I started doing better in my classes when I framed everything through my lens rather than viewing it through the instructor's lens.
I don't know the correlation but I think a lot of entrepreneurial families tend to have good problem-solving children or maybe it is a selection bias among friends. It could be genetic but I think these families tend to reward / not punish ingenuity. In addition, I believe part of the equation is leaving children alone to figure things on their own. It sucks but I think that letting your kids jump into the deep end of the proverbial pool makes them better for it even if they flail for a bit.
Give them boundaries but give them the space to figure it out and make mistakes. I know it drove my parents crazy that me and my siblings took everything apart and argued systematically but it paid off in our adulthood.
> Seems like society should try to figure this out.. if attitude is so important, why can’t we cultivate it systematically?
We do. It's called culture.
But culture doesn't optimize for something so narrow since it exists in a much wider context than just "what's good for knowledge workers in a capitalist system".
If candidates know going in that it's a leetcode interview it filters for "do you want to work here so much that you'll spend a month or two drilling on these exercises". Which can be a useful filter if there are thousands of qualified applicants.
Not sure what you meant. Leetcode type things solves a problem of past. Future will be copilots doing lot of grunt coding work and human value add would be instructing copilots the right way, bringing broader contextual information. Solving binary search tree problems during interviews will eventually go away (once old guards go away)
We agree, solving binary search tree problems do not need solving. That's an old problem. Problem is if you need people to choose and adapt algorithms for a specific new problem, copilot will have a hard time and so you will have a hard time if you don't know how the algorithms work and never adapted one. Because copilots are not good at choosing the correct algorithm and adapting it for new problems, as far as my experience with the competitive programming course I took goes anyway.
If you have an old problem, copilot can solve it, true.
