New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: What to do about ‘Good at programming Bad at Leetcode’

Ask HN: What to do about ‘Good at programming Bad at Leetcode’
34 by mikymoothrowa | 77 comments on Hacker News.
Over the past few years I've met people who are really good programmers when it comes to putting together a full back end system , creating a very nice front end or creating any kind of app for that matter. Many of these people are fresh out of college and the ‘industry’ puts them through leetcode/hackerrank style rounds that are needlessly hard. I’ve seen the kind of questions these rounds have and quite frankly, if I graduated this year, there’s no way I’m going to get a job. Ever since 'Cracking the coding interview' was released, every company's interview process has become like Google's and Google didn't have a particularly great interview process to start with.[0][1] Now, there are several GitHub repositories that prescribe 3-4 month grinds on leetcode questions to "crack" the interview. And people do go through this grind. The people who do manage to crack these rounds are not necessarily good at programming either because the time they spent doing competitive programming stuff should have been spent learning to build actual things. The no-whiteboard companies are very few, hardly ever seem to have openings and not hiring junior engineers. What would be your advice be to fresh college graduates, or anybody for that matter, who are good at programming but not at leetcode? Surely there must be a way to demonstrate their understanding of algorithms without having to spend 3-4 months memorising riddles [0] homebrew creator.. https://mobile.twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en [1] Zed Shaw gets offered a sys admin job https://ift.tt/m51F3Rk