Coding interviews are broken
Imagine the following
You’ve spent weeks sending out job applications, you’ve studied data structures and algorithms for months, and you’ve practiced leetcode, completing both the Blind 75 and NeetCode 150. Finally, you feel ready.
After landing the interview, you get 45 minutes to prove your coding skills. It’s going well until you’re faced with a tough leetcode problem you have never seen before. You struggle to solve it, and the interview ends in disappointment.
Next day: rejection email. Sadly, this is the current state of the interview process for most engineers.
Leetcode != Real job
Leetcode-style interviews fail to accurately measure engineering skills and don’t reflect actual daily engineering work. This gamified approach is broken and a poor indicator of critical thinking skills. See, for example, what the creator of Homebrew tweeted after failing a coding interview at Google: