@deprecated Overall you gotta be smart to do well in them, the kind of intelligence that can help you make a breakthrough in tech. If a company wants to hire based on LT or IQ they should be able to. Time will tell if this method is optimal. Which I think it’s not but there’s few alternatives for hiring programmers.
@deprecated Yeah I do agree that LT or IQ are not ideal when assessing the level of experience and one’s ability to implement good solutions on real world projects.
@Inginsub @OmegaVariant Maybe some complexity constraint is the issue?
I’ve never spent time on leetcode but my impression is it’s like Project Euler where the key is knowing the trick to avoid brute forcing a solution
@Inginsub @OmegaVariant Oh, I didn’t read this line:
“Given a string password, return the minimum number of steps required to make password strong.”
That bit is what changes it from “this is a reasonable question” to a leetcode “this is stupid, why are you wasting developer time on it” problem.
>the password is considered strong if it has at most 20 characters
The stupidity starts here, really. But yeah, calculating the minimum necessary number of changes may not be that hard, but it’s really annoying.
@Inginsub @OmegaVariant I don’t know why anyone would ever want to do it except in some odd academic research context. The question being asked at all makes me think there were serious problems with the team who wrote the requirements in this hypothetical scenario.
Nobody codes for that level of efficiency and optimization though. It is all masturbation.
>This isn't a question about password security, it's about how good you are at writing an arbitrary algorithm.
I know, but that's not the job or the craft. People who think it is are a pain in the ass to deal with, and interviewers would do well to remember that they're being implicitly interviewed as well.
@DrRyanSkelton @deprecated @Inginsub @OmegaVariant This on first sight seems like a dynamical programming problem. Those kind of problems are just hard to devise prompts, and somehow they aren’t willing to create straightforward prompts like for those math problems, sadly.
@deprecated @OmegaVariant
So is this the coding version of a bullshit math quiz problem that your teacher thinks is a good idea?
@TapWaterAddict @Inginsub @OmegaVariant @deprecated An important thing to remember is that a whole bunch of people who claim they are programmers can’t actually program. I don’t know about this “LeetCode” business, but back the day when C and C++ were the thing, we’d make sure someone could make a good stab at, say, reversing a doubling linked list, computing factorial N, and there would be some whiteboard code with various flaws and errors we’d expect them to find some reasonable fraction of.
Of course some of this depends on how hard the problems you have to solve in your business really are. FAANG minus to a degree Netflix have really hard ones, if nothing more than scaling and doing it with distributed systems. People also get upset if the AWS us-east-chaos-monkey region has a problem (Netflix … well, however difficult their problems, actually is said to have started the practice in a big way of using a “chaos monkey” process to randomly kill parts of their infrastructure to make sure fail overs would work, control planes didn’t get overloaded, etc.)
@OmegaVariant It’s not optimal, there are tremendous numbers of false negatives when they use this type of screening because people who spend their time writing useful software instead of screwing off on leetcode get filtered out.
In practice it’s just hazing.