10 Increasingly Sarcastic Reasons To Use LeetCode-Style Interviews
A parody of nothing in particular
10. It allows your company to filter out people who do not demonstrate “baseline coding ability”
I am not claiming that “Leetcode-style” coding interviews accurately reflect real-world software engineering, but they do serve as a way to very quickly filter out candidates who cannot demonstrate basic programming abilities. This can be assessed a very basic LeetCode question called the FizzBuzz Test.
Is the test perfect? No. Will some qualified candidates fail simply do to nerves? Sure. But this test allows for a very quick demonstration of basic competence.
9. It allows for a standardized test that is fair and easy to facilitate
“Tell me about yourself.” “Explain to me how you resolved a conflict.” Behavioral questions will be answered very differently by people, and technical questions serve a different purpose.
If you ask candidates the same LeetCode question, it allows for a fair and standardized test. You are not concerned simply with whether or not the candidate answers correctly, but with their thought process. Do they communicate well? Do they not give up easily? A good LeetCode-style coding interview is like pair programming, a window into what it will be like to actually work with a software engineer candidate.
8. It is relatively easy to set up
Simulating the environment at an actual company is difficult and time-consuming. Using a platform like CoderPad or Repl.it, on the other hand, takes seconds.
7. It allows interviewers to connect to their roots and remember the days of “pure coding”
There was a time when the simple act of programming felt like magic.
There was a time when we were all content to print two words on a console.
From there, we learned data structures. We learned algorithms. We completed problem sets to well-known problems, and we worked together in teams to help each other grow.
LeetCode takes us back to those days, before we were faced with the realities and complexities of real-world coding for governments and corporations.
6. It can really help you buy and sell stock if you invent a time machine
A very common problem in the tech industry is how to optimally buy and sell stock when the user acquires precognition and/or a time machine. Ordinarily, this would be trivial, but by the complex laws of physics and time travel we are all required to solve such a problem in O(n) time.
5. They can prepare candidates for when they have two baskets, have to put fruits into baskets, and can only pick one fruit from each tree
I recently read a lengthy article by a senior software engineer at Google, who took his interns to an orchard full of apples, oranges, and i-value-fruit fruits. Naturally, the orchard only contained a single row of trees, and each intern had two baskets that could only hold one fruit, and each intern was only allowed to pick one fruit from each tree, and each intern was required to stop when reaching a tree they could not pick a fruit from. All the Google engineer wanted to know was how to optimally pick fruits in this extremely common situation.
One intern figured it out, and the senior engineer was so inspired that it became a popular interview question at Google.
4. It allows candidates to compress strings
Imagine, in a not-so-distant future, that you are a computer scientist tasked with using the scientific method to do science. Using your science, you are shocked to learn that a radically advanced, technologically superior alien race called the Trisolarans is preparing to attack Earth because someone at Nasa got drunk and transmitted them coordinates to our planet.
Using science, you discover that an even more advanced alien race capable of saving humanity is in reach. You try to contact them by sending a distress signal using plain text somehow, but the Trisolarans are hot on your tail.
To thwart your efforts, the Trisolarans intercept your signal and rate limit it. You must compress a string but you are also restricted by the Trisolarans from using a known library for the task.
Thank goodness you studied LeetCode and the Sliding Window Technique.
3. It is an excellent distraction from hacking the mainframe
Imagine, for the sake of hypothetical example, that you are kidnapped by a crazy person at gunpoint. The kidnapper is actually the leader of a super-advanced underground hacker organization called FSociety. He is also the #2 hacker in the world.
You are #1. A huge plot twist in the story is that FSociety actually stands for Fun Society.
The #2 hacker challenges you to solve the anagram problem in LeetCode because he erroneously believes that LeetCode is a hacking site. You are using LeetCode as a distraction from your secret efforts to surreptitiously hack the mainframe using the Sliding Window Technique, but unfortunately you also have to actually solve Anagrams.
Thank goodness you remember how to use hashmaps.
2. It allows your company to search for The Chosen One
There is a place called The Source, a place from which all things originate and a place where senior engineers are allowed to take their true form as 50-foot tall titans. Here, one can see operating systems that never will and never will be.
It is here that the greatest programmers in the world convened, and prophesied the birth of the One True Coder. The One True Coder would prove that P != NP, free humanity from the shackles of AI-generated Quora posts, and invent the One True Programming Language that would bring about world peace, prosperity, and an ultimate end to the tabs vs. spaces debate.
For better or worse, the programmers discovered that the Chosen One could only be discovered by Signal, a universal coding energy that binds the universe together. Signal can only be detected with LeetCode.
- It gives us a sense of order in chaos
LeetCode is a fantastic place where problems are relatively simple. Everything has an answer, and to view it you just have to view the community solutions (or the official solution if you paid for Premium).
The real world is nothing like this. In the real world, environments can take days to set up, bugs can be the result of ludicrously-large legacy code bases or even external libraries, and sometimes to make anything work you need to download 500 dependencies and then grapple with some software upgrade that has three neat new features and invulnerability to a dangerous vulnerability that was just discovered, but results in having to make 250 changes just to make the system work as it had before.
Sometimes, it’s nice to just run code and see a little green instead of 200 failing test cases.
Sometimes, it’s nice to debug with three print statements before finding out the problem.
Sometimes, it’s nice to at least pretend the real world has fewer variables.
