u/starraven wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I asked my engineering onboarding buddy/ mentor if they think it would be worth it for me to get my bachelor’s in CS while working at my newest job. They told me I am really good at interviewing, and that’s all I really need. I wonder if the progression ladder really is all leetc
u/michaelnovati replied ·
So Leetcode the site came out in like 2012 or something and these companies have been doing these kinds of interviews for years.
It's not actually about the Leetcode, it just feels that way when you look at the interview structure zoomed out like an alien would with no internal context.
Someone told me once that they thought a certain tech leader wasn't very smart (objectively) compared to others. All of the people in power in tech are at least very smart objectively, but each one has a different perspective, experience, and strengths that come out in different ways. Being smart is table stakes, but when you are comparing them all head to head, someone might appear smarter than another.
Being an engineer at a top tech company is similar. Being able to solve problems is table stakes and then what makes you a good engineer is all the rest of the stuff about you.
The way these companies test people for problem solving is by giving you a small focused problem you can solve in 20 minutes, they normalize the languages and stacks and frameworks, and they access your problem solving ability in a way that's easy to compare to thousands of others.
It's an efficient and scalable way to test for that core problem solving bar.
It's not sufficient for a good engineer but it's necessary.
I struggled with Leetcode-style problems at first and got a job without even being good at them. But I showed my problem solving abilities and got the job, and then over time as my problem solving strengthened and improved I happened to get better at Leetcode problems without even knowing the concepts like sliding window and kadane's algorithm by memory.