me and a friend were arguing about this and i think the part i left out before is AI
like even if you accept that leetcode was never supposed to perfectly simulate the job and is just meant to test reasoning/pattern recognition/grind or whatever, does it still work as a hiring signal today?
you now have AI that can look at a self-contained coding problem, reason through it, generate multiple approaches, optimize the brute force solution, explain the complexity, all in minutes. then you have tools like Cluely and similar stuff specifically built to sit alongside interviews
you can’t really just pretend those don’t exist
meanwhile the actual job has also changed. engineers are already using AI to write code, review code, debug things, generate tests, understand unfamiliar systems, etc.
so wouldn’t it make more sense to assess someone inside an actual codebase? give them a scoped repo, a task, maybe even an embedded AI assistant and see what they actually do with it
can they find the relevant code? understand the system? decide what needs changing? tell when the AI is wrong? make the change without breaking something else?
obviously you can still cheat and obviously i’m not saying “here’s our 10 million line production repo, you have 40 minutes”
but surely a whole codebase with context is harder to just outsource to some interview copilot than “here’s one neatly packaged algorithm problem”
so i’m genuinely curious why we’re still optimizing hiring around leetcode instead of adapting the assessment to how software engineering actually works now
I think they are terrible, but also I suck at them. I think I’ve had to do only one thing remotely like such problems once in my 30 year career, and I figured it out over a couple of days like all the hard problems I encounter.
When I make hiring decisions, I want to see a clear understanding of defensive programming, troubleshooting techniques, curiosity, ability to question assumptions, recognition of local standards, and ideally a proven track record of delivery. Dumb questions are better than no questions. And for Christ’s sake, when I ask you how you figured out a hard problem, don’t fucking tell me you asked AI. If that’s a resource you know how to use well, that’s great, but I want to know you know how to solve hard problems if anthropoic goes out of business.
I had one guy say he asked AI and tried a bunch of things and none of them worked, so they paid more money and asked a smarter AI and that found the problem. Mate, you didn’t solve shit. That’s like saying, “every time I am stumped, I ask John and he fixes it.” Well, ask John if he’s looking for a job because I’m interviewing the wrong person.