Why does LeetCode still exist?

Key Takeaways

this style of interview is still growing if you were in the position of giving me advice what would you do would you really tell me to stop at this point hey everyone it's your boy I'm back and so today I wanted to kind of talk a little bit about coding interviews and leak code why do they still exist let's take a look at a tweet um and this is actually a few months old from October of last year and I actually saw this from our old friend Clement I'm not sure if any of you remember that uh exchange we had a couple years ago but anyways the Tweet is by um I don't know how to pronounce his name so I don't want to risk getting it wrong but he has a pretty big social media following not only on Twitter but on other socials as well he previously was I believe like an engineering manager at Uber and he has honestly a lot more industry experience than I do so this is what his take was and he was responding to somebody else's tweet who had I think like a legitimate point to some extent I think this is like an argument that I've briefly talked about a couple times on this channel and it's an argument that comes up a lot when it comes to elak code now to be honest I don't really know who this person is but I assume they have a lot of like experience and what they say is Everybody Hates these whiteboard coding tests that people are forced to take in interviews and for good reason the main problem is that they tell you absolutely nothing useful when I'm hiring I want to hire people who will integrate well with the teams who have demonstrated their ability to learn who are creative and show some initiative who can communicate effectively in code and English I'm looking for a contributor not a Code Monkey I don't really care if they can pull code out of their heads like a rabbit that's a learnable skill software development is primarily a social activity now nowadays so I'm also screening for soft skills the Whiteboard tests are telling me that you're hiring somebody to work alone in a cave where they'll throw a slab of meat whenever they get hungry and I think the rest of it is just kind of rambling or yapping he had a funny uh phrase right at the end he said dump those Mickey Mouse code writing games into the trash where they belong and the problem I I have with like giving my opinion on this is that obviously I have some biases and I'm going to briefly talk about those I'm going to talk about other people's biases I'm going to talk about a few different things and I'll try to put them into like a coherent video but the first thing I just want to tell you is leode interviews as of now they're actually not decreasing to my surprise to my own surprise leako interviews are still a thing it's 2025 leak code interviews are still a thing and I'm not just saying that I'm I swear to you like here's some data if you don't believe me this is public data if you go to Google Trends and you search for a eat code take a look at the graph uh let me move my camera but uh this is public data I'm not making this up so you can see here like NE codes been growing back back when I left my job at Google and I think that was when chat GPT first came out or at least it first like became popular at the end of 2022 and look what happened if I had given up if I had stopped working on N code which a lot of people told me like I can go to some of the comments people told me just stop it's over leak code is dead you're coping if you keep doing it and if I had listened to them I would have stopped here but I didn't I just kept going and things have just been continuing to go and I'm not saying that this is necessarily going to continue forever but like GPT 4 came out still increasing uh you know the the newest models that came out I can't even name what they are look it's still increasing NE code is still growing this style of interview is still growing now who knows maybe this line will completely drop off at some point at some point it probably will maybe 10 years from now 5 years maybe longer maybe shorter it's really hard to tell if you were in the position of giving me advice what would you do would you really tell me to stop at this point I don't think that would be the Strategic move okay so for whatever reason this type of interview has not gone away yet in my opinion I haven't really seen major signs of it diminishing either big companies are still doing this style of interview as much as many people hate it and so our other friend here had a very different opinion on this and so I guess before I give my opinion let me give this counter opinion as well here's the uncomfortable truth it doesn't matter that whiteboard coding tests or leak code don't measure a lot of things a Dev needs to do day-to-day they are the currently known most economical filter to hire at scale I'm talking when you hire 100 plus devs per year or a th000 and obviously in big Tech's case probably over 10,000 a year easily over 10,000 a year hiring is done by people who are devs themselves and you want to keep a similar bar between different parts of the org yes task that simulate day-to-day work give better signal but they require larger investment and it's problematic when the question leaks when you do more than 20 to 30 interviews with the same question expect it to leak and be googleable when people search for what your hiring process is with algorithmic questions it makes no difference if it leaks given companies have a question Bank in the hundreds a nice side effect for large companies is they self- select for people who are willing to put up with BS things AKA spend considerable amount of time to do something mostly pointless prepare for these algorithm interviews just because it's how things work and what it takes to get the job those who refuse to do this would likely not be a fit for these environments where these interviews are the first or last things that are process you follow just because and I'll finish the rest of this but let me just kind of interject for a bit and say uh there's very much some truth to that for example let's say your a Dev you have 10 years of Industry experience maybe it's startup experience you like moving fast you like building things and you don't really care about algorithms or low-level things like that and now you want to get a job at Big Tech well let me just tell you if you're not willing to do 100 leak code problems to prepare for the interview to get in you're really going to hate the job as well because I don't know how it works at all of the big tech companies but I'm pretty sure at most of them a lot of the skills that you have to learn you do it on the job and let me tell you it's really not fun I don't know who finds changing config files who likes learning about a lot of like super super esoteric knowledge like in my opinion just like a completely different way of doing things at like a certain company they just have a certain way of doing things and there's a lot of bureaucracy there's a lot of overhead there's a lot of like things in the way and like Le code in my humble opinion is the least of the problems I mean it's a pain in the ass it's stressful sure but the job even though it's quite different than the interview there's still like plenty of things wrong with the job as well but anyways and make no mistake these places screen uh for soft skills teamwork Etc these are done via recruiter screen hiring manager interviews to some extent architecture and bar raiser very good point obviously the coding interview isn't just done like it's not like exactly an online assessment it's not exactly a standardized test that people just take pass or fail and then just get in there's a lot more involved in that and that's uh those are some of the things that I actually struggled with when I was trying to get hired uh but to finish this the coding interview is usually one or two out of five to six interviews and the coding part is usually the most trivial to pass for anyone putting in the effort to prep see the point on putting up with the most Pointless Stuff the job asks for the problem is not that big Tech uses these hiring processes it makes perfect sense for them it's when small companies is hiring 5 to 10 people per year copy it without thinking more on how to build a sensible hiring process without blindly copying it and uh he links to his newsletter which I would recommend people checking out like he's a very a good content creator I think he's one of the good ones very like genuine uh person he makes a couple more points in the replies he wouldn't be surprised if like inperson interviews come back because there actually has been a lot more people cheating lately it's gotten a lot easier to do that uh but it was honestly always pretty easy to cheat people did it a lot more than you think and some people even admitted to doing it so uh I'm not trying to like a snitch or anything uh but there's this video and it's a public video it's like six years old now from Old School YouTuber Joma and here's like a 10-second like clip from this video where he was being you know pretty brutally honest that's one of the things I always liked about J nice but uh I also actually had a call does something different they make you do a coding challenge oh I didn't um and I just Googled the cing challenge and I found it and I just just copy pasted it and it was totally fine remember yeah so I think one of the arguments that people make a lot is everybody is cheating like these interviews suck everybody just cheats through the interviews people say it as if it's a new thing people say like well with chat GPT it can solve all the elite code problems uh people been cheating people have been cheating it's it's very easy to cheat like there's so many ways to cheat and it's not like it was hard back then either like you heard what he said he just Googled it and he found it and that was it how do you stop something like that how do you stop leaking uh well with online assessments it's practically impossible because those are like fully automated but once you get to the human phase it's pretty hard to cheat through that I'm pretty sure like you could have all the cheating resources available to you if I was interviewing you it like it'd be so obvious because I'm not going to ask you just write a loop I'm going to ask you like questions to see how deep you understand the code that you've written and if you don't understand it if you can't tell me what would happen if I removed one or two lines of code then you don't understand it and I I think that'd be pretty hard for you to chat GPT through that so now finally let me give a few of my thoughts and to do that we have to answer the ageold question of does size matter specifically in this case we are talking about company size and that's something that people just really seem to to ignore with this leak code interview argument and we saw from those two tweets it's very relevant in my opinion sure if you have a small company maybe 100 people total you have a lot more freedom and control over the interview process but as you scale as you get more and more people I guess it's better to differentiate between small and big things change like it does matter the size does matter it changes the equation and whatever you say about like the big Tech hiring process so far it seems to be working I mean I don't have any internal data on the companies maybe things are changing maybe they have certain data that is changing in either direction but I mean over the last 10 15 years this interview process has created companies worth trillions of dollars there are legitimate flaws that have been pointed out there are legitimate flaws in this process but you could say that about anything there's B with everything every software has buggy code it has bugs there's problems with every team there's always problems but it does work that's the point of interviews hire people that are good now sure with a like smaller company you can have a better interview process and what are we talking about when we say Better or Worse let's let's kind of think about that as well like let's say you have a circle of candidates like this is everybody and let's say that only a certain percentage of these let's say a quarter are like good candidates and honestly it's probably a lot less than that I should make this smaller I should say 10% because I mean my God most people are awful they're genuinely awful and some people know it and some people don't even know it like they think they're good and they're just not and it's I'm not trying to be mean I'm not trying to hurt anybody's feelings but I I just genuinely believe that I just think that it's just true but uh let's say you have like a certain percentage of these people that are uh good like these are the people that you want to hire now I think that the interview process like the current interview process let's put it in Orange it intersects with this and it doesn't get everybody that's the problem that it actually doesn't capture everybody in this circle and it also probably captures some people outside of that Circle as well but my argument is that it looks more like this like maybe it's something like that versus other people probably think it looks like this or maybe like that where there's like not a lot of intersection and the reason that this is important is because we're getting to the question of like what are good hires and bad hires if I have an interview process that looks like this once in a while uh maybe I'll get some people that aren't good maybe I'll get a small percentage of bad hires like let's say 10% bad hires or maybe 20% but 80% of people most people through this process are going to be good now the problem is there's a lot of good people that this interview process process is missing out on now in my opinion if you're a good developer there's no way that you can't get reasonably good at leak code I mean sometimes it is pretty hard like some of these interview questions are pretty insane companies definitely have different like levels that they're looking for and stuff like that but I mean most people can learn this stuff now is it a Time waster yeah sure but I think that's kind of where we get to like the biases that people have the reason I think the biggest reason people complain about this process the interview process it's just because they hate it they hate leak code if they didn't hate leak code why would they complain and I personally like leak code so you know that's my bias I like solving these kinds of puzzles I'm decently good at it so obviously I'm going to be biased in the other direction now if the interview process does change I would be willing to adapt to it but uh anyways this is just how the game is currently played the goal of these companies is not to hire everybody that's a good developer it's just to make sure that the people that they do hire are pretty good not perfect but pretty good they're pretty smart they can learn things quickly and if you can get good at algorithms and data structures I really don't see how almost anything on the job would be impossible for you to learn if you can do some of these crazy algorithms What specifically about the job is going to be too difficult for you at least in terms of technical things like which database which SQL query is going to be the one that you know just blows your mind sure there's plenty of difficult things in development but the difficulty from those things in my opinion comes more from like experience rather than how smart you are that's what this process is trying to do just have a good enough way to hire people that are at least good enough basically like standardized tests work in school now a problem with this I think when it comes to like the size is that small companies uh copied the big companies with u big companies when people start copying each other sometimes they don't even know why they're doing it like if you're at an airport or something and you see a bunch of people you get off your plane you see everybody walking in a certain direction you're probably going to follow them if you have no idea what to do and that's what most companies did they just kind of copied this process now if you are a small company and you're doing interviews this way and you can't figure out a better way to interview people for your specific company and you look for the specific skills that are going to be relevant to your specific company then there's something wrong with you like you should not be doing leak code interviews if you have a small company I've interviewed plenty of people and for my uh for NE code obviously leak code skills are relevant and even I didn't ask people for leak code interviews it's a lot easier to tell who's a good hire and who's not even for me now there was like Le code was a portion of that but yeah anyways so like people start copying and they don't even know why they're doing it but that does not mean that big companies should necessarily change let me tell you a little bit about something called inertia anytime you change something we don't always always know what the effect is going to be like in software development we do experiments and kind of test the uh changes with feature Flags or something and then measure uh the the metrics and like the changes that happened so anytime you have something you don't know is it going to be a positive change or is it actually going to maybe make the process even worse at least with the current process like the companies they know what the current process is they have metrics on it and I I don't know what those metrics are but as long as the interview are still being pretty good and they're getting pretty good hires why would they change the process they really don't have a reason to change it there are plenty of higher priority things that companies could actually be working on and obviously if you have a better idea why don't you try to sell it to Big Tech if you do have a sort of standardized process which is that's what big Tech is looking for they're looking for standardized because interviewers at companies at big companies and probably at small companies too nobody likes interviewing even I didn't really like interviewing that much I mean I kind of liked it just because like I like algorithms but it's painful going through interviews cuz most people fail the interview and you know within the first five minutes if the person is going to pass or fail and usually like 80 90% of the time they're not going to pass and then you have to sit through the next 45 minutes and it's just really painful people hate interviewing so much people want to code people want to build they don't want to like hold somebody's hand through like a 45 minute interview at least most of the time but yeah anyways like if you have a better idea a startup idea where you think that you could make standardized interviews that are actually better you should try to sell it to Big Tech because you'll probably make a lot of money by doing this and I know of many companies I know of many people that are actually trying to do this right now and we'll have to see if they turn out to be successful or not but ju just doing like a few thought experiments for a second if you would not like right now if you're listening to this and you really hate leak code interviews and you think there's a better way then you should definitely start a company and if you're not willing to do that you have to ask yourself why I think probably the biggest reasons would be you probably think that it won't work and even if you think it will work you think that the risk is just way too high and if you think the risk is way too high what do you think the big companies are thinking do you think they're just all of a sudden just going to abandon everything that's mostly been working so far now what actually makes hiring good well one very good way of hiring people is hiring people that were interns at the company because like the one of the tweets that we read earlier said that that's the best way to test people pay them for a little bit have them do some temporary work see how well they work with you and then you have like a very good test of whether a person can actually uh perform at the job or not that's great but obviously that's very expensive that's a lot more expensive than doing like an interview and I'm not just talking about from the money perspective paying the intern however much money they make 10K 20K 30k over for a summer honestly the companies don't care so much about that they care about the time investment in the interns unless you're a rockstar which and Rockstar interns are very much worth paying for if you're only getting paid this much for a summer internship and you're an actual Rockstar you're getting underpaid but that's kind of what I mean like you have to weigh the pros and cons like this is one very viable and good path and companies will definitely continue doing this um but this is not like infinitely scalable uh but moreover like hiring is just expensive in general another good way would be hire people you know so like people that you've already worked with in the past and that's hard to do like that kind of requires like networking and like getting started with something like that is the hardest part but another thing that I've seen lately and this has been a thing for a while but people getting hired via social media you see it a lot especially on Twitter you see somebody who is posting in public like just on their Twitter talking about things talking to random people about something they were interested in just building stuff over the years and people take notice and then they eventually get hired or they start their own company or something like that happens like for example this guy who to be honest I'm not like super familiar with him I follow him and he follows me he is working on a startup right now he's a very young guy I won't call him like a kid because I don't want to like be insulting but he's very young I think he's like 19 or 20 or something like that and I don't know his full story but I've seen him posting on Twitter for the last like couple years I think at least he's probably been doing it longer than that he just enjoys coding he does stuff that he enjoys he talks about it online he does things that are genuinely useful for people and people take notice and then all of a sudden you have opportunities I can tell you this person almost certainly he's gotten job offers for people just because of his Twitter and it's not like he's posting fake things on Twitter I think when I give this sort of advice a lot of people take it in like a transactional way like you just have to check the boxes and then life is great and then you'll get hired you have to be genuine to some extent which isn't easy like you can't fake this type of passion but you can like sort of cultivate it by doing things that you find enjoyable putting them out there connecting with other people who have like similar thoughts and just being passionate being genuinely good at what you do proving it to people if you do that like people will hire you I can tell you I would hire this guy on the spot I wouldn't even think about it I'm sorry I called him this guy the whole time he obviously has a name Aiden so sorry Aiden but uh anyways those are some of my thoughts on this I tried to keep it coherent I don't know how it uh actually ended up but yeah I mean in terms of like me trying to predict the future I honestly have no clue but this is just kind of my thought process on this I don't really know how a lot of the companies are seeing this right now but from what I can see things don't seem like they're changing just yet