HACKER Q&A
📣 ipunchghosts

Are LeetCode interviews appropriate for senior/staff scientists?


I'm a staff computer vision researcher and ML/AI scientist with 20+ years of experience in XXX research & development. I've developed real-time CUDA/C++ systems for YYY that achieved 100x speed increases, architected large-scale ML infrastructure, and led teams in developing production computer vision systems. My work has been published with 350+ citations.

Recently, I've been interviewing and consistently encounter LeetCode-style technical assessments. While I understand the need to evaluate technical skills, I find this approach problematic for several reasons:

1. These exercises rarely reflect the actual work. In my experience, real engineering challenges involve system architecture, ML pipeline design, and performance optimization – not inverting binary trees.

2. In my leadership roles across research labs and industry, I've observed that engineers who excel at LeetCode-style problems don't necessarily perform well when faced with complex, real-world challenges that require thinking about system-level implications.

3. These interviews leave little room to discuss what I believe are more relevant topics: ML architecture decisions, HPC optimization strategies, deployment considerations, and how my experience building production systems aligns with the company's technical challenges.

4. I find these exercises painfully boring compared to my day job, where I work on fascinating problems in computer vision, deep learning, and high-performance computing. Spending hours on contrived puzzles feels pointless when I could be demonstrating my ability to solve real engineering challenges through system design discussions or code reviews of actual production systems.

I'm curious about the HN community's thoughts: - For those in hiring positions: How do you evaluate senior/staff level candidates with extensive research and development experience? - For other experienced engineers: How do you handle these situations? Have you found companies that take different approaches? - Has anyone successfully implemented alternative evaluation methods that better assess real-world engineering capabilities?

My goal isn't to dismiss algorithmic knowledge – I've spent years optimizing complex systems and developing novel algorithms. Rather, I question whether LeetCode exercises are the most effective way to evaluate experienced engineers who have demonstrated their abilities through years of shipped code, peer-reviewed research, and complex production systems.


  👤 lbhdc Accepted Answer ✓
It seems more like a sign of the current hiring climate. There have been a lot of layoffs and contractions in tech, and so companies are getting flooded with applicants (many of whom may not be accurately representing their skills).

My assumption is that these tests are lower effort ways to effectively weed out a large portion of applicants.


👤 ipnon
I just got asked to do the problem where you calculate permutations of coins to total X cents problem. I spent 2 minutes with Claude passing their test suite. I had 58 minutes left in the test so I redid the solution with dynamic programming, converted to TypeScript, added JSDoc annotations, runtime profiling, caching, even some Easter Eggs. They loved it.

I don’t know what the point of these quizzes are now. Actually I never knew what the point was. At least they are amusing now.


👤 tart-lemonade
I view reliance on Leetcode-style exercises as an attempt at putting a hard number on a notoriously subjective process, whether because a company is cargo-culting big tech, HR wants to eliminate subjectivity as a defense against lawsuits, or because interviewers can't agree how to run things and it ends up being the least-hated solution.

My team's interview process has a couple algorithm questions but they're fairly basic (to ensure you can still code), the main portion is about API design and system architecture. It's not very objective, but I like it since it is directly relevant to our work developing middleware systems and navigating competing interests in the process.


👤 grajaganDev
Absolutely not.

I also have 20+ years of experience in software development.

My skills and experience are not available to any companies using Leetcode style interviews.


👤 6510
I would ace the pieces of code but couldn't architect if my life depended on it.