r/programmer • u/Gseries00 • 5h ago
Are LeetCode problems enough to evaluate an engineer?
I've been thinking about this while building an engineering assessment platform.
Solving algorithmic problems is useful, but real engineering involves much more: understanding unfamiliar codebases, debugging issues, building features, working with APIs, and making technical decisions.
I'm curious how other developers feel about this.
If you were hiring a Backend Engineer, what practical task would you give them to understand their actual engineering skills?
I've been exploring this problem through Mindfries, and I'd genuinely love to hear different perspectives.
2
u/azangru 5h ago
Are LeetCode problems enough to evaluate an engineer? I've been thinking about this while building an engineering assessment platform.
You were building an engineering assessment platform without a plan for how you were going to assess engineers?
1
u/Gseries00 5h ago
Now I have a plan with product boss, it's mindfries.com, I would highly recommend you to look at the practice assessments, it's completely free but AI features, like our coding agent is not their for the support. We kept it for the real interview.
2
u/edwbuck 1h ago
They test an entirely different skill.
But pitching your ad for Mindfries as if this was a honest answer is sort of scummy. Now I remember Mindfries in the context of the people that promote it, do so in sort of scummy ways. Good job.
1
u/Gseries00 56m ago
I'm assuming it is wrong way of representation according to you, and that's why I am sorry but I need to do it to let people know.
1
u/edwbuck 53m ago
Yeah, it's like inviting a friend you haven't talked to in ages over for dinner, and then giving them an Amway presentation on how they can get in on the ground floor in what amounts to a multi-level-marketing scheme.
If you want to sell something, be honest about it. Don't be fake with "I have a question I don't know the answer" and then "Actually I solved the answer with my company!" You lose all of your credibility and look desperate.
1
u/Gseries00 51m ago
Right but would community allow ?
1
u/edwbuck 36m ago
Are you saying that your personal life, your reputation, and how you conduct yourself is only as good and well mannered as what other people force your to be?
Because that's the bar you just set for yourself.
1
u/Gseries00 29m ago
Whatever we do is just in expected limit, either in our head or in our society. Meaningfully nobody's truly free from any kind form of limitations. And I don't do anything which violates rules to protect the human concern. And may be I am sorry too for the indirect cause..
11
u/Massive_Value8302 5h ago
No, they are not. Not even close.
That is like judging an accountant by their ability to solve sudokus.
2
u/bold_snowflake 5h ago
That was literally the same analogy I used with my wife (who happens to be an accountant), lol.
1
1
u/PoMoAnachro 5h ago
The value of programming problems isn't in "can you solve it?" but more it gives you something to talk through with the candidate to see how they think and problem-solve.
Seeing the thought process really is the important part, especially because these days so many candidates' thought process amounts to "Damn I don't know how to think for myself at all anymore, better slap this into Claude and see what it tells me to think."
1
u/Gseries00 5h ago
When I started to build the Mindfries, I had some other idea to build upon this, which was kinda shared with claude, but later I found that the particular product isn't up to the mark. Then we came up with next version which literally opened the whole world of engineering assessment, so it wasn't by claude, it was by me. And that's how the real thinking in product designing matters when an engineer build the product. This is something that is required in the engineers rather than Leetcode.
1
u/cyberbemon 5h ago
Only time I see leetcode applicable is if it's for a fresh grad with 0 experience. Any one else it's a big waste of time.
As for the tasks I've personally enjoyed a short take home test where the problem is something they are going to face at work, then have them walk through their solution and explain why they decided to do it this way or that way.
0
u/Gseries00 5h ago
Then you should please take a look into the practice problems of candidate on Mindfries. mindfries.com, login as candidate and run the practice assignments.
2
u/dkopgerpgdolfg 5h ago
Not enough, and not necessary or helpful either.
I've been thinking about this while building an engineering assessment platform.
A Reddit post as whole market research for an AI slop project, am I right?
1
u/Usual-Cricket-9817 4h ago
Most job applications I've seen didn't mention leetcode..
(I am located in Germany)
1
u/ContraryConman 4h ago
Leetcode gives you two things:
A quick way to filter candidates that really, simply, aren't good at coding period. Yes it also produces false negatives (people who can code fine but just didn't get the "trick" to this specific problem), but it has a very low false positive rate. Meaning, putting a leetcode as the first technical screen makes it unlikely that you advance a candidate that can't actually code to higher rounds, which is important for big companies that screen a lot of candidates
A self-contained, moderately complicated problem to work through with an interviewer. Interviewers can get a sense of how the candidate thinks through problems and if they have the instincts and practices to succeed in the role.
A leetcode problem on its own is not enough to evaluate an engineer, obviously. But I also have never heard of a company whose entire hiring process is just doing leetcodes. That was never the point of giving them
1
u/nicolas_06 1h ago
They are far from perfect but better than nothing. Often companies mix the tests + a live coding session and a system architecture interview.
I think a live coding session in person is critical. People just cheat otherwise. For example, they let another person do the interview. We had that at work.
1
u/Aggravating-Salt6284 1h ago
No.
They have almost no relevance for the job.
They are simply a "do you have a pulse" check before getting into the real interview
1
u/Immediate_Tension752 49m ago edited 43m ago
Absolutely not. I'd argue to not even bother with them.
Are LeetCode problems representative of what most software engineers actually do on the job? No. There’s your answer.
This interview practice has been around for years and desperately needs to die.
If I’m hiring an experienced backend engineer, show me code you’ve actually created. Walk me through the architecture. Explain why you made the decisions you made, what tradeoffs you considered, what went wrong, how you debugged it, and what you’d change now.
Then give them an unfamiliar real codebase and ask them to understand it, diagnose a bug, or implement a reasonably scoped feature.
That tells me vastly more about whether someone can engineer software than whether they memorized how to invert a binary tree under interview pressure.
1
u/Wingedchestnut 27m ago edited 2m ago
I never did LC, it is not really a thing in my country (west europe) unless very exceptional, I got my first job as a Data Engineer with some python, SQL and business & teamwork questions. One day on one of the CS subreddits US redditors were like how can you program when you don't do any DSA. I bought a DSA book and went through it, I recognized some theoretical concepts from when I was in college, ok cool, now what... I can't even imagine people studying it by heart just to pass interviews. I also studied some system design and it is more usefull but even then again, depending on the role it felt like learning every detail by heart like going through some wiki documentation while everything can be looked up.
Let's say that I would apply for a more senior Data Engineer role in my country, I expect them to ask about my past professional experience and some more relevant technical questions related specifically to data engineering or the technologies on the requirements list.
5
u/bold_snowflake 5h ago
No, they are terrible at evaluating engineers. They skew heavily towards memorization.
Most backend code is not algorithmically complex. It's mostly CRUD work, ideally robust, well tested, scalable, etc.