alt Hacker NewsIts not really memorizing solutions. Yes you can get quite far by doing so but follow ups will trip people up. However if you have memorized it and can answer follow ups, I dont see a problem with Leetcode style problems. Problem solving is about pattern matching and the more patterns you know and can match against, the better your ability to solve problems.
Its a learnable skill and better to pick it up now. Personally I've solved Leetcode style problems in interviews which I hadnt seen before and some of them were dynamic programming problems.
These days its a highly learnable skill since GPT can solve many of the problems, while also coming up with very good explanations of the solution. Better to pick it up than not.
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I'm fine with that in an interview... I'm not fine with that, in a literally AI graded assignment where you cannot ask clarifying questions. In those cases, if you don't have a memorized answer a lot of times I cannot always grasp the question at hand.
I've been at this for 30+ years now, I've built systems that handle millions of users and have a pretty good grasp at a lot of problem domains. I spent about a decade in aerospace/elearning and had to pick up new stuff and reason with it all the time. My issue is specifically with automated leetcode pre-interview screening, as well as the gamified sites themselves.
I'd say that learning to solve tough LeetCode problems has very little (if not precisely zero) value in terms of you as a programmer learning to do something useful. You will extremely rarely need to solve these type of tougher select-the-most efficient-algorithm problems in most real-world S/W dev jobs, and nowadays if you do then just as AI.
Of course you may need to pass an interview LeetCode test, in which case you may want to hold your nose and put in the grind to get good at them, but IMO it's really not saying anything good about the kind of company that thinks this is a good candidate filter (especially for more experienced ones), since you'd have to be stupid not to use AI if actually tasked with needing to solve something like this on the job.
Ironic that you’re touting these puzzles as useful interviewing techniques while also admitting that ChatGPT can solve them just fine.
If you’re hiring software engineers by asking them questions that are best answered by AI, you’re living in the past.
Few people are in both circles of "can memorize answers" and "dont understand what they are doing".
You would need "photographic" memory
Been in software development for 30 years. I have no idea what "Leetcode" is. As far as I know I've never been interviewed with "Leetcode", and it seems like I should be happy about that.
And when someone uses "leet" when talking about computing, I know that they aren't "elite" at all and it's generally a red flag for me.
Leetcode with no prep is a pretty decent coding skill test
The problem is that it is too amenable to prep
You can move your score like 2stddev with practice, which makes the test almost useless in many cases
On good tests, your score doesn't change much with practice, so the system is less vulnerable to Goodharting and people don't waste/spend a bunch of time gaming it
It is and isn't. I'd argue it's not memorizing exact solutions(think copy paste) but memorizing fastest algos to accomplish X.
And some people might say well, you should know that anyways. The problem for me is, and I'm not speaking for every company of course, you never really use a lot of this stuff in most run of the mill jobs. So of course you forget it, then have to study again pre interview.
Problem solving is the best way to think of it, but it's awkward for me(and probably others) to spend minutes thinking, feeling pressured as someone just stares at you. And that's where memorizing the hows of typical problems helps.
That said, I just stopped doing them altogether. I'd passed a few doing the 'memorizing' described above, only to start and realize it wasn't at all irrelevant to the work we were actually doing. In that way I guess it's a bit of a two way filter now.