I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today
Interviewing people is hard. Most people suck at it. I&#x27;ve interviewed over 100 people in my life, and I&#x27;ve been interviewed about ten times. I know I still suck at it.<p>The code test is one of the more annoying facets of interviews. On the hiring side, it&#x27;s an efficient way to screen and vet candidates for basic skills. It&#x27;s relatively low cost to the employer to have a recruiter issue the test.<p>If you come up with your own in-house code test, it still requires time to evaluate and grade the submissions. There&#x27;s also a fairly large cost to creating an in-house code test (I know from experience). You have to balance complexity so that it requires enough skill to pass, but isn&#x27;t so onerous that it puts off too many candidates.<p>Using something like LeetCode removes all the cost from the employer side. Someone else maintains it for you, and you get a canned score at the end. It also depersonalizes it, and provides an opportunity for people to game the system by memorization. The same applies to using canned whiteboard&#x2F;algorithm questions.<p>I think most of this is a colossal waste of time. It turns away people who don&#x27;t want to spend hours (or days) on each interview. Imagine applying for even a handful of jobs where each one expects you to do a take-home test that can take a full day. Who has time for that? There&#x27;s the &quot;if they really want to work for us, they&#x27;ll take the time to do it&quot; argument, but let&#x27;s face it, most people are not that passionate about where they work until they actually work there.<p>As a candidate, I am loath to spend my time on these. As someone who&#x27;s been doing this for 30 years, I&#x27;m also a bit insulted by having to do the monkey dance over and over again. At this point in my career, I don&#x27;t bother applying to places like this. My resume speaks for itself.<p>Of course it makes sense to vet the technical skills of candidates, but you can learn a lot more from 15 minutes of questions than you can from a code test. If you present a candidate with some abstract questions and a couple of targeted detailed technical questions, you can tell if they&#x27;ve got the right problem-solving mind and if they&#x27;ve had experience with the technology you&#x27;re working with. It&#x27;s also a much more personal experience.