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
Been hiring for many years. I’ve never made a decision based upon of even cared a tiny bit about the results of a programming assignment. I prefer to simply talk through how they think about problems. I’d rather hire a person that knows nothing of algorithms or time complexity that can reason and learn than somebody that can write a pangram verification or heap sort in minutes but generally sucks at communication or reasoning.
Same here. And when I was looking for jobs, I never had to do a programming excercise. Maybe that’s a regional thing? I’m located in Germany.
The most technical thing I had to do during an interview was to give feedback on some code - it took about five minutes and they were happy enough as soon as I criticized the use of field injections. It was a good format though, because it got us talking about technical stuff.
That is not the experience I had with jobs in Germany (remote from abroad). They were extremely rigid and by the book. It made me stop applying for jobs I’m Germany.
Were you doing on location interviews?
Hiring now?
Unfortunately no. Did a few months back but not at the moment. Times are tough out there. It was a very good candidate pool which is candidly not a good sign.
Then why give the assignment in the first place? I’ve actually started declining to interview if a programming assignment is required. I’m a senior embedded systems engineer; if I can’t give you the confidence that I know what I’m doing in a standard interview (whiteboard problem solving is fine) then it’s unlikely I’ll be able to get the job anyway.
We don’t, but even if we did it would be for the other interviewers I suppose.