I'm a Systems Reliability and DevOps engineer for Netdata Inc. When not working, I enjoy studying linguistics and history, playing video games, and cooking all kinds of international cuisine.
And someone who’s studied tons of Leetcode problems is more than likely a decent developer.
No, not really. LeetCode has the same issues that most similar 'coding challenge' systems do, as well as the general concept of coding challenges as usually implemented in interviews. In particular, they only really show that you can translate from already engineered solutions to real problems to code, which is not what actual software development is about (if it was, we wouldn't need humans to do it).
Take question #4 for example (Median of Two Sorted Arrays). I can throw together a valid solution that meets the time complexity requirement in maybe 5 minutes in 5 different languages that they support and at least 3 more that they don't without having to look at documentation. That doesn't mean I can actually do any useful development work in those languages, it just means I understand the algorithm they want well enough from the description that I can implement it in any language that I have a basic understanding of the required syntax.
Now, if you're just trying to test a person's ability to 'translate this complex text into an algorithm', then yes, it's passable (but not great). Beyond that though it tells you very little about their ability to do useful development work.
true... sometimes I wonder why when interviewers told me my 5 or 10 minute coding is 100% accurate, but I didn't give them the "most optimal solution", and they don't hire me, and I went back to daily life, open up some app, and the program isn't even really running correctly, let alone "is it most optimal".
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No, not really. LeetCode has the same issues that most similar 'coding challenge' systems do, as well as the general concept of coding challenges as usually implemented in interviews. In particular, they only really show that you can translate from already engineered solutions to real problems to code, which is not what actual software development is about (if it was, we wouldn't need humans to do it).
Take question #4 for example (Median of Two Sorted Arrays). I can throw together a valid solution that meets the time complexity requirement in maybe 5 minutes in 5 different languages that they support and at least 3 more that they don't without having to look at documentation. That doesn't mean I can actually do any useful development work in those languages, it just means I understand the algorithm they want well enough from the description that I can implement it in any language that I have a basic understanding of the required syntax.
Now, if you're just trying to test a person's ability to 'translate this complex text into an algorithm', then yes, it's passable (but not great). Beyond that though it tells you very little about their ability to do useful development work.
true... sometimes I wonder why when interviewers told me my 5 or 10 minute coding is 100% accurate, but I didn't give them the "most optimal solution", and they don't hire me, and I went back to daily life, open up some app, and the program isn't even really running correctly, let alone "is it most optimal".