I disagree with a lot you have to say, even though you have valid concerns with are shared with a lot of hiring managers I talk to.
> 1. Significant amounts of people cheated during college, and if asked probably wouldn't even identify their behavior as cheating.
Unless you have some real data backing this up, you can't claim this is true.
> 2. Significant amounts of competent people don't even have a degree.
Don't disagree here, though the question of whether or not leetcode proves competency for day-to-day software engineering (of which changes given the type of job you are interviewing for) is still debatable.
> 3. Many people with degrees are incapable of actually programming even basic algorithms.
I have seen this phenomenon and it is a valid concern. However, you can still test for basic algorithms without resorting to leetcode hard questions on phone screens, which happens often (i am speaking from experience).
> 4. There is an incredibly high demand for this job because of its pay, leading many people to pursue this job in the market that have no actual interest or aptitude for the work.
Agreed, sort of. Its supply and demand - where the supply is artificially kept low at the interview stage be eliminating too many candidates who can't solve leetcode hards. Many of those candidates could be adequate, especially with minimal training.
A lot of your concerns are 1st order, surface level, but the solutions to the problem of tech interviews are a couple layers deeper in the stack. Leetcode is a monkey patch, an adequate one but it has its own set of problems that are ignored. That's why we keep seeing discussions about leetcode on HN.
> > 1. Significant amounts of people cheated during college, and if asked probably wouldn't even identify their behavior as cheating.
> Unless you have some real data backing this up, you can't claim this is true.
Universities has no reason to crack down on cheating, students who cheat pays just as much money as those who don't. Rather it is better the more students cheat since it means they are less likely to drop out and stop paying. Only cost is reputation, but I have never seen a university get called out or cancelled over not catching enough cheaters, so even the reputation cost is tiny.
I have personally seen a lot of cheaters, I have heard people talk about cheaters etc. Cheating might not be common at every single university, but it is definitely common if you look at higher education as a whole. And of course none of those will ever try to track that data since it doesn't benefit them anyway. As long as they don't track it they have plausible deniability.
On the cheating point, I think casual academic cheating is a subset of behaviors of "making the grade without actually learning", which ostensibly leads to credential inflation. Cramming material without retention is one example. One can cheat oneself out of learning without actually cheating.
>> 1. Significant amounts of people cheated during college, and if asked probably wouldn't even identify their behavior as cheating.
>Unless you have some real data backing this up, you can't claim this is true.
As a nitpick, you should be able to claim whatever you want. But besides that... from my experience in college (and as a TA for an intro class) I tend to agree with the sentiment that a significant amount of people cheat. It doesn't mean MOST people cheat, it's just "significant". I remember one week where 30 of our students (10-20% of the class) pasted an answer from Stack Overflow word-for-word. One student went so far as to put a sheet of looseleaf over their friend's paper, and trace every symbol by hand.
What company gave you a LC hard on a phone screen and what was the exact question?
To take a quote from your book, “Unless you have some real data backing this up, you can't claim this is true.”
What many people call a “LC hard” is really a fairly trivial DFS or DP problem which with proper preparation shouldn’t be much of a problem, and is more likely an east or medium.
Unless you have some real data backing this up, you can't claim this is true.
You'll never get real data on this because the people doing it and not getting caught won't admit to it. You just had to listen carefully to what your friends-of-friends were talking about at parties to know what they were up to.
> Unless you have some real data backing this up, you can't claim this is true.
* Pick any undergrad CS program
* Pick any course at that program
* Do a Google search for “<coursenumber> project site:GitHub.com”
I never cheated in school and what it got me was a middling GPA, less time to drink and network, and job prospects that pay roughly half of what I could be making.
If you’re in school, learn from my mistakes: you’re there to get a degree and a high gpa, not to learn. You should absolutely cheat as much as possible, just don’t get caught.
> 1. Significant amounts of people cheated during college, and if asked probably wouldn't even identify their behavior as cheating.
Unless you have some real data backing this up, you can't claim this is true.
> 2. Significant amounts of competent people don't even have a degree.
Don't disagree here, though the question of whether or not leetcode proves competency for day-to-day software engineering (of which changes given the type of job you are interviewing for) is still debatable.
> 3. Many people with degrees are incapable of actually programming even basic algorithms.
I have seen this phenomenon and it is a valid concern. However, you can still test for basic algorithms without resorting to leetcode hard questions on phone screens, which happens often (i am speaking from experience).
> 4. There is an incredibly high demand for this job because of its pay, leading many people to pursue this job in the market that have no actual interest or aptitude for the work.
Agreed, sort of. Its supply and demand - where the supply is artificially kept low at the interview stage be eliminating too many candidates who can't solve leetcode hards. Many of those candidates could be adequate, especially with minimal training.
A lot of your concerns are 1st order, surface level, but the solutions to the problem of tech interviews are a couple layers deeper in the stack. Leetcode is a monkey patch, an adequate one but it has its own set of problems that are ignored. That's why we keep seeing discussions about leetcode on HN.