The Leetcode Generation
This is to you, software engineer. Leetcode has been damaging to our generation. It has made it so convenient to practice that every other candidate burns hundreds of hours. You either match it or are truly exceptional and lucky. Because everyone does it, it’s not a differentiator anymore, it’s a mandatory rite of passage.
Ironically, the more leetcodeable a question is, the more chatgptable it is, so the less valuable the skill, making it even more absurd.
But I digress. It’s just the world we live in.
I’d like to see software interviews evolve in the industry. To be fair, there have been all kinds of attempts to change: take-home exercises, open source contributions, end-to-end projects… none have proved to be consistently better.
At this stage, I’ve interviewed hundreds of candidates throughout multiple companies. Ultimately, I try to answer one question: would I want this person to work alongside me? That’s it. I’m not trying to answer how many hours did you Leetcode or how fast you can traverse a graph. I’m not even mildly curious. Just, do I want to work with this person?
When I start the hiring process, my initial stance is ‘yes’, so you already have that in your favor. But you can sabotage yourself in a number of ways. Here are a few ways to turn a ‘yes’ into a ’no’ faster than you can say ‘binary tree’:
- Not being a clear communicator. You don’t need to be Churchill, but if I can’t understand what you are doing, working with you won’t be easy.
- Producing code I wouldn’t want to review.
- Hallucinating. It’s always better to say that you don’t know something than be caught with a GPT-2 level answer.
- Cheating.
- Faring worse in the exercise than the typical candidate (the only place where Leetcode may help).
There are many other signals I’d like to gather, but I won’t know unless you raise a red flag. Will you be responsive and predictable? Will you show up?
Real-world skills, genuine curiosity, and the ability to collaborate effectively are what truly set candidates apart. Let’s strive for a hiring process that values the whole engineer, not just their ability to solve contrived problems under pressure.