Horrible. I’ve been doing software engineering for 12+ years and I’ve never had to pass leetcode questions. I have worked for 5 companies in total, and I think I have been in around 15-20 tech interviews in total as well. The interviews I passed didn’t ask me leetcode questions (I had to do take home assignments and system design). In my last interview they finally stop asking coding questions (staff position). No Faang companies, but tier 2 I’d say. Western Europe.
I guess it depends on the company, as well. I have no idea what engineers at faang do. I can tell you what I have been doing the last decade:
- decide what kind of db we should use for our next product. Usually a relational one is good enough, although sometimes document or graph ones are needed
- DDD. Or at least I try. Our engineers are able to understand the business and relate terms of the problem domain with ones in the solution domain
- identify race conditions. Phantom reads? Those suck, but I keep them out of my codebases
- maintenance of public APIs. From authN, to authZ, and keeping backwards compatibility as much as possible
- observability, monitoring, slas, slos, slis
- debugging distributed systems and distributed monoliths
- splitting monoliths into microservices because “why not”, and later regret and start with monoliths again for fresh products
- decoupling services by using tools like kafka and debezium
- mentoring and couching
- helping PMs, POs and business people to build products on time
- a large etc
You know what I have never done? Invert a binary tree. I have read the Cormen book; it’s just that if the company I’m going to work on is all about the things I have mentioned above, then asking leetcode questions is a red flag.
I'm interviewing for Staff level positions and this came in the email of one of the recruiters
> For the technical interview, visit leetcode.com and do practice questions at a
medium/hard difficulty in Algorithm, Data Structures, and Object-Oriented categories to help prepare.
I guess for some of us there is no escaping leetcode.
I'm glad that you have had this experience! However, passing leetcode questions will typically open up new job opportunities and increase total compensation.
Anecdotally, I actually find it a good filtering signal for top talent. That is, all the best engineers I've worked with have always been able to crush leetcode interview questions, even if they find the questions annoying.
I think it is probably only a good filter if truly trying to hire the top 1% of engineers. Almost nobody is though, as is evident from their undifferentiated pay scale.
Lists, sets, graph traversals, parsing, knowing when to use hashmaps, using recursion, knowing when to use a priority queue don’t have much to do with programming or software engineering?
CS101 algorithms and data structures of course are relevant to programming.
But Leetcode interviews in practice aren't about knowing those.
If they were, people would not prep for months specifically for Leetcode, and FAANG recruiters wouldn't advise spending months rehearsing for those (for everyone from undergrads with CS101 fresh in mind, to senior engineers who routinely use those in real-world situations).
Prep with titles like "Cracking the Coding Interview" aren't about understanding or practicing software engineering. They're about passing fratbro pledge hazing rituals.
>But Leetcode interviews in practice aren't about knowing those.
I'm going to guess about 85% of leetcode questions that are asked by top copmanies fall into the CS101 algorithms and data structures bucket. Seriously you can go to leetcode right now and look at Meta's most common interview questions and almost all of them are basic data structure questions.
I'm not saying passing the interviews are easy. You definitely have to practice coding fast (at least, I did!).
Sure the questions may have a twist, but most of the time there's no esoteric weird algorithms.
That is unknown, as people at FAANG in the US have a comparable quality of life as those in Western Europe, because the things people tout as European advantages like free healthcare and long paid vacations, FAANG workers in the US essentially already have. They are getting paid much more for a similar standard of living, which in turn decreases their retirement age, if they so choose.
Leetcode didn't exist before "anti discrimination" laws. It was created specifically to give corps a legal barrier to defend against suit because the Fed wrote the law in such a way that you can easily and successfully sue any company for discrimination during the hiring process. So they filter out as hard as they can in a "neutral" way.
You can see the effect in realtime. Google products are worse than they were 10 years ago when they have good devs that cared. They left and now it's just gears in a machine someone else made.
