> ...this moronic interview practice would alienate an obvious asset
> The lack of faith in our fellow humans is disgusting.
This kind of catastrophizing and dismissive language makes me want to ignore everything the author says. If you think being evaluated in an interview setting is somehow unfair, I think you should consider whether your attitude is the problem. If you are actually good at leetcode and continue to fail onsites, you're almost certainly giving off red flags in some other behavioral category.
At my (FAANG-ish but not in the acronym) company, many of the candidates we fail are leetcode gurus who have a negative vibe. Maybe they're technically pretty good, but they have an ego on the level of Linus Torvalds. Or maybe they trash talk their current team or boss, or avoid giving straight answers to simple questions about their background. Or they've got 8 years of experience but can't talk about anything they did to grow the younger people on their team. Maybe they launch into brain-dumping a solution they memorized from a practice problem without explaining their approach. Or perhaps they are aggressive and stubborn when given corrective hints.
As a dev who will be on the same team as the candidate in the event an offer is made, my primary incentive is to vote no on any assholes I cross paths with in the interview. I don't give a shit if my no-asshole standard means the company needs to spend another 3 months and $100k on recruiting costs to get an equivalently skilled non-asshole candidate for my team. I consider those costs part of MY total comp.
Beyond the junior level, success usually means working well with others and bringing a growth mindset for yourself and others to each project. Mentoring others. Learning and teaching. Being a steward and doing unglamorous work for code health. Slinging feature code is a minor part of it in big companies, so you need to figure out how to signal all these other forms of value in the interview. And avoid sending out red flags.
For me, leetcoding people is basically asshole behavior, on the part of the company. The whole idea of "let's have a tournment where we have candidates grind on arbitrary problems for months as a part of preparation, mhwahaha (evil laughter)" sounds like something out of Donald Trump's playbook. No wonder it tends to select for (often, money-driven) assholes who see it as par for the course, while many mature and reasonable people are put off by it and never even bother to apply.
I feel like unless there is an alternative and the labor pool is large enough companies are not incentivized to look at other ways of evaluating engineers.
I’m glad that there is a “shortage” of engineers. Likely this isn’t a problem that can be solved anytime soon. The past 2 decades were a brief time when FAANGs could provide a ton of benefits (both financial and non financial, such as eg dev tools) which attracted hordes of people to them. They successfully shaped the industry and now most tech firms are expected to provide great benefits. The number of startups and unicorns is large enough to stem the flood of engineers that they used to get before, and now they will be forced to use different strategies.
> The lack of faith in our fellow humans is disgusting.
This kind of catastrophizing and dismissive language makes me want to ignore everything the author says. If you think being evaluated in an interview setting is somehow unfair, I think you should consider whether your attitude is the problem. If you are actually good at leetcode and continue to fail onsites, you're almost certainly giving off red flags in some other behavioral category.
At my (FAANG-ish but not in the acronym) company, many of the candidates we fail are leetcode gurus who have a negative vibe. Maybe they're technically pretty good, but they have an ego on the level of Linus Torvalds. Or maybe they trash talk their current team or boss, or avoid giving straight answers to simple questions about their background. Or they've got 8 years of experience but can't talk about anything they did to grow the younger people on their team. Maybe they launch into brain-dumping a solution they memorized from a practice problem without explaining their approach. Or perhaps they are aggressive and stubborn when given corrective hints.
As a dev who will be on the same team as the candidate in the event an offer is made, my primary incentive is to vote no on any assholes I cross paths with in the interview. I don't give a shit if my no-asshole standard means the company needs to spend another 3 months and $100k on recruiting costs to get an equivalently skilled non-asshole candidate for my team. I consider those costs part of MY total comp.
Beyond the junior level, success usually means working well with others and bringing a growth mindset for yourself and others to each project. Mentoring others. Learning and teaching. Being a steward and doing unglamorous work for code health. Slinging feature code is a minor part of it in big companies, so you need to figure out how to signal all these other forms of value in the interview. And avoid sending out red flags.