Just for one anecdote, three years ago my then-dentist (who was a part of a franchise practice and probably under pressure to bill) told me that I had 12 (!!) cavities across all quadrants of my mouth that needed to be filled immediately.
I went to another dentist in the area, they took some x-rays themselves, and told me that there was nothing that needed immediate work - maybe one pre-cavity that would eventually turn in to something but certainly not worth doing anything with now.
Three years later (and sticking with that new dentist) I still haven't needed to have anything done (and certainly don't have any pain in my mouth anywhere either).
Here's the difference: I bet you had time to think through the novel problems and didn't have someone hovering over your shoulder, demanding you come up with solutions within 20 - 30 minutes -or else-.
The example I always give people is imagine that you're a civil engineer and you walk into the interview and they have a bunch of Popsicle sticks, sticky tack, and a bowling ball.
They inform you that your interview is to build a bridge with the sticks and tack that can support the bowling ball rolling across it.
(Yes, I know the age-old argument that 'real' Engineers are accredited and all that, but I still think the example shows how ridiculous it all is)
Not at Microsoft, but have been at a company for a very long time being underpaid. I haven't left simply due to one issue: I refuse to do leetcode interviews. I've dipped my toes into the waters every once in a while and even the companies that swear to me up and down before interviews that they don't do leetcode, well, guess what I discover during the interview loop...
Would you be willing to share your story of how you made the switch? CS major here considering going into medicine (despite your best efforts to convince otherwise :) ) but the general coursework wasn't something I targeted in school all those many years ago.
Anecdotal on my part, but I interviewed with them earlier this year. I was told by the recruiter (an internal recruiter, to be clear, not a third-party), in no uncertain terms, that their interview process did not involve "leetcode-style problems" and would, instead, be a "real world problem" close to what an engineer might be expected to solve normally.
I was told (and this was reflected in the interview prep materials they provided) that bringing my own IDE and screen-sharing was the norm, although they would be prepared with a collaborative online editor as backup. It would be a collaborative session where the interviewer would work through the problem with me (obviously with myself in the driver's seat).
I was reasonably excited. Finally, a tech firm that didn't cargo-cult leetcode hazing.
And then came the interview.
I leave it to the reader to guess at the nature of the problem (hint: it starts with 'l'). The interviewer also seemed entirely unprepared and surprised that I was prepared with my own IDE. They were also unwilling to collaborate, and unwilling to accept how I approached solving the problem (I like to write experimental pseudo-code out first as I think through things, especially when in an environment where drawing things out isn't easy. I let them know that was what I was doing and explained my thought process as I wrote it, and yet they kept interrupting and explaining that I could clean that code up... code that was not meant to be "final" or "complete"...)
It was just a terrible experience from beginning to end. From the recruiter presenting an interview plan that was clearly not in line with reality, to the interviewer being unprepared for what their own interview prep materials described (BYOIDE!), to the interviewer's unprofessional and very unhelpful demeanor (if day-to-day engineering at Stripe involves being berated at every step as you prototype a solution to solve a leetcode problem before preparing to write the actual solution...well, maybe they should fix that)
That is fair. I have not encountered them myself, nor ever been an interviewee where "tablestakes" is the bar and not "hard leetcode haha I know the answer and you don't~~", but I absolutely acknowledge, recognize, and understand that this is a real occurrence as well. In those cases, I wholeheartedly agree with the label.
In an industry that is deadset on focusing on worthless leetcode puzzles as the major gating factor for a hire decision, I struggle to understand how someone "banging away hopelessly" is decidedly unqualified.
> All of them consider themselves extremely lucky that they landed a job at a great company and believe that if they had to re-interview for the same position, odds are much more likely they'd utterly fail it.
I expect we'd see this absolute disaster of an interview "process" fixed overnight if every company required their employees to re-interview for their position yearly (through some blind process so the interviewer isn't aware they're interviewing someone who already works there - yes I'm aware this won't work for small companies... it's not going to happen to begin with so let's just pretend :P).
Every company would immediately start a "task force" to fix their interview process once they reject (and then fire) 90% of their staff after the first re-interview.
I've taken to simply waste interviewer's time at this point. I'll schedule an interview, find out it's a leetcode one, and still plan to attend. With everything remote now, I can just completely check out. Watch a video on another screen while just completely wasting the person on the other end's time.
Even better if I can somehow get to a "virtual onsite" where I likely get to waste 4+ people's time.
If there was a viable solution to pushing for real change in the industry, I'd do that. But there really isn't.
Hah, I don't mean to be rude but, this is what everyone claims they do, but no-one actually practices it.
The simple fact of the matter is, is that if you can't 100% solve the problem, in 30 minutes or less, without asking questions related to how to construct a solution, and cover all edge cases, and come up with the absolute top-tier optimal solution, you're getting rejected.
That is why it's worthless as an interview technique. Everyone plays this whole song-and-dance about how they "just want to see how you approach a problem you might not know how to solve" but, in the end, the only thing that matters is regurgitating the top leetcode solution to the problem.
I share the same experiences. Only around half of your (temporal) experience and every conversation with a recruiter ends the same way: "When can we schedule you for a technical screening? You'll probably want some time to brush up on leetcode as well".
My experience doesn't matter. The fact that I've now worked at (and currently work at) 3 of the big tech firms, doesn't matter (to be fair, I only got jobs at these places back when I was willing to grind out leetcode and memorize as many problems as I could - a task which I refuse to do today). The fact that I have a history of leading teams, areas, and spend at least 50% of my time also "writing code" for high performance, high reliability, global services, --and-- can speak in depth regarding my accomplishments, design decisions, technical decisions, collaboration, etc. doesn't matter.
The only thing that matters is: Can I pretend like I've never seen this toy leetcode problem before during an interview, and magically come up with a perfect solution in 30 minutes or less. (and if I haven't happened to memorize it, and dare legitimately appear to struggle, well... game over).
Sure you can. At least, if our baseline for "realism" is, "an approximation of what someone will do on the job".
I'd say asking someone to regurgitate some solution for a random leetcode problem is far worse an approximation than asking someone to write, say, a little toy API that does nothing more than retrieve a value out of a set.
See how well they're able to develop in a language of their choosing. Can they get started immediately or do they stumble putting together the first little building blocks?
Treat it like a "real-world example" and make that clear up front. Do they think about logging and metrics? (for the purposes of a toy interview problem, just writing to stdout for both would be sufficient). Do they think about dependency injection? What about unit tests?
Then follow it up by asking them to modify a bit of their logic. ("okay, we've got it returning a matching value from the set if it exists - what if we wanted to add in wildcard support at the end of the incoming string?").
Tons of very real things to consider, even in the constraints of a simple toy problem.
As someone who works in Big Tech, I would much rather have people on my team who think about maintainability, debuggability, monitoring, what can go wrong, etc. etc. (and have shown during an interview they're capable of writing some trivial business logic around that) than someone who absolutely nailed mirroring a binary tree and solving the longest common sub-sequence problem.
I do. I used to reject recruiter's advances the moment they described the interview process as a leetcode-hazing ritual (my words, not theirs), but as I've become even more grumpy/depressed over the poor state of things I might take it step further and start wasting their time (interviewing and then running the interviewers in circles for a while).
For myself it's a combination of morals as well as the fact that I've simply become so depressed due to my current place of work that I don't think I have the capability to engage in the prep work, never mind that particular type of interview itself.
To lend some credence to the former (the morals) - I have succeeded at leetcode hazefests in the past. I've worked at two mega-cap tech companies, and the last time I seriously interviewed (half a decade ago...) I was successful at multiple companies (all of which took each and every interview session from a page of leetcode, or if I was really "lucky", CtCI)
So I expect if I could get over the depression (not likely) I could probably prepare and maybe even succeed. But even then I don't think it's something I'm willing to give on, even though the rewards for myself would likely be substantial.
(Similarly, I also refuse to interview candidates at my current employer, as they insist on the same thing)
It's funny, where everyone else seems to have the problem of "ideas are a dime a dozen, but time to execute is scarce", I just have zero ideas. My only true passion in the world of software development is gaming (the one area where I, like everyone else, have lots of ideas), and, well, being an independent game developer is an even worse crap-shoot than lining up for leetcode interviews! (I won't argue that it's not a self-defeating attitude to have in regards to considering indie game development, but the numbers certainly don't lie here)
I suppose I probably should at least just start some interviews and then decline at the point that they start leetcoding-proper (even if that's during the actual interview itself).
DS& (common) A isn't a problem at its core (as least as far as I am concerned - I'm comfortable that I am able to pick the right one given the scenario, describe why, etc.), but where it becomes a problem for me is when I'm inevitably asked to reproduce some esoteric (for example) binary tree or graph algorithm on the spot, in 30 minutes, with no errors.
I'd love nothing more than to go out and get a new job, but I swore years ago to never again participate in leetcode hazing interviews, and every recruiter I've spoken to (15+ in the past few months) has described exactly that as the interview process.
Absolutely no relation to my technical abilities for any job I'd be looking at (besides, of course, passing an interview to begin with).
Please don't get me wrong: if it was just a few days of practicing, I'd just get it over with and do it. But realistically, with the leetcode arms-race that's gone on for the past few years, where you're expected to solve multiple hard-level problems back-to-back, with no assistance, and as quickly as possible (ie: under 30 minutes), I'm staring down the barrel of probably 3+ months of full-time grinding to memorize as much of them as possible.
Just not worth it. I'm terribly depressed as it is already, and that would just make it much worse.
I went to another dentist in the area, they took some x-rays themselves, and told me that there was nothing that needed immediate work - maybe one pre-cavity that would eventually turn in to something but certainly not worth doing anything with now.
Three years later (and sticking with that new dentist) I still haven't needed to have anything done (and certainly don't have any pain in my mouth anywhere either).