Did you mean to type 25? 5 years ago LC challenge were as, if not more, prevalent than they are today. And a single interview for a job is not something I have seen ever after 15 years in the space (and a bunch of successful OSS projects I can showcase).

I actually have the feeling it’s not as hardcore as it used to be on average. E.g. OpenAI doesn’t have a straight up LC interview even though they probably are the most sought after company. Google and MS and others still do it, but it feel like it has less weight in the final feedback than it did before. Most en-vogue startup have also ditched it for real world coding excercices.

Probably due to the fact that LC has been thoroughly gamed and is even less a useful signal than it was before.

Of course some still do, like Anthropic were you have to have a perfect score to 4 leetcode questions, automatically judged with no human contact, the worst kind of interview.

I literally got my first real job 26 years ago by talking about my game engine, for a fintech firm.

I don’t know if this has changed or perhaps was not representative but my entire loop at Anthropic involved people reviewing my code.

Might depend on the specific position you applied to. Was it a pure SDE role or more on the research side ?

Basically pure software engineering

Interesting, maybe they stopped doing this then. It used to be that you received a link for an automated online test, with 4 progressively harder questions, and you needed to score 1000/1000 to go the next step and speak to a human.

There's an entire planet of jobs that have nothing to do with leetcode. I was talking about those, not FAANG stuff. Unfortunately I am not FAANG royalty.

>Of course some still do, like Anthropic were you have to have a perfect score to 4 leetcode questions, automatically judged with no human contact, the worst kind of interview.

Should be illegal honestly.

5 years ago non-FAANG companies were fully in leetcode mode for interviews. Maybe 10-15 years ago you could totally avoid it without much problem.

In most European companies that isn't a thing.

Thankfully not everything from SV culture gets adoption.

It might be illegal; certainly if you can show that LC is biased against a protected class, then there would be grounds for a lawsuit.

> certainly if you can show that LC is biased against a protected class, then there would be grounds for a lawsuit.

That wouldn't be hard to do. Given the disparate impact standard, everything is biased against a protected class.

Only if there is enough evidence. Yes, I can say that the inability to account for things like the ADA in the US can place an employer in hot water, however, since LC doesn't make those decisions, they are immune. The accountability is placed upon the employer. Don't hate the players or the game. Maybe just figure out how to fix it without harming everyone, be popular enough to make said idea into law, and get into a position of power that allows you to do so. If that sounds hard, congrats, welcome to the reason why I never got into politics. Don't even get me started on all the people you will never realize you are hurting by fixing that one single problem.

I never meant to imply that LC would be violating the law.

Good legal disclaimer!

I meant no human-in-the-loop wrt hiring, which is what I thought you were getting at.

It's the same exact thing - if some company makes you jump through hoops to get hired that you find distasteful just don't apply to company.

Not all of us are market extremists. The “invisible hand of the market” doesn’t care about human rights.

I don't understand what you're saying. We're not talking about the market exploiting labor because before you are hired by the company you're not labor for the company. Is this really that difficult to understand?

You don't know their interview process unless it's one of the big tech companies though.

No. Certain things just harm basic human dignity and should be outlawed. Judgement comes from our peers, not from machines.

Not sure if that's a typo. 5 years ago was also pretty LC-heavy.

Ten years ago it was more based on Cracking the Coding Interview.

So i'd guess what you're referring to is even older than that.

Talking about general jobs not FAANG adjacent.

Nearly everyone is FAANG adjacent

Apart from those companies where social capital counts for more ...

I rarely apply for or interview at FAANG or adjacent companies...

I read this, and intentionally did not read the replies below. You are so wrong. You can write a library, even an entirely new language from scratch, and you will still be denied employment for that library/language.

> 5 years ago you'd have a project like that, talk to someone at a company for like 30m-1hr about it, and then get an offer.

Based on my own experiences, that was true 25 years ago. 20 years ago, coding puzzles were now a standard part of interviewing, but it was pretty lightweight. 5 years ago (covid!) everything was leet-code to get to the interview stage.

I have been getting grilled on leet code style questions since the beginning my of my career over 12 years ago.

The faangs jump and then the rest of the industry does some dogshit imitation of their process

I'm lucky I'm in the frontend webdev sphere then I guess instead of like being a pure backend guy. I've had a couple of those live ones and just denied them. I did manage to implement a "snake" algorithm once but got denied because I wasn't able to talk about time/space complexity.

As someone who’s hired 10s of engineers across multiple companies, it’s bullshit on the hiring side too.

It was humbling having to explain to fellow adult humans that when your test question is based on an algorithm solving a real business problem that we work on every day, a random person is not going to implement a solution in one hour as well as we can.

I’ve seen how the faangs interview process accounts for those types of bias and mental blindness and are actually effective, but their solutions require time and/or money so everywhere I’ve been implements the first 80% that’s cheap and then skips on the rest that makes it work

>As someone who’s hired 10s of engineers across multiple companies

Any way to reach out? :)

I think it boils down to companies not wanting to burn money and time on training, and trying to come up with all sorts of optimized (but ultimately contrived) interview processes. Now both parties are screwed.

>It was humbling having to explain to fellow adult humans that when your test question is based on an algorithm solving a real business problem that we work on every day, a random person is not going to implement a solution in one hour as well as we can.

Tell me about it! Who were you explaining this to?