I think the industry has this backwards. All the focus is on writing code and there are so many issues doing that within an interview context.
The interview should be all about READING code. The original reason for writing code during an interview was to filter those who can't code. And so problems like fizzbuzz were created and that expanded into leetcode. But does anyone really think that if you ask someone to read a moderately complex piece of code and they can fully explain what it's doing, they can't write a simple for loop? If you can read code, then you can write code. And reading code during an interview if far less stressful than writing. So you will get much higher signal from the interviews since the stress of writing code during an interview causes many good engineers to do poorly. Or never try at all since they don't have time to practice to the point where the stress doesn't matter because it's rote memory.
Reading code is also better at showing the difference between a junior and senior engineer. If a junior or senior crams leetcode and spits it out during an interview, the result will look the same and you really don't know if they are junior or senior. But reading code is where years of experience can really shine.
And I want to stress again, reading code is so important, I think more so than writing. If you're only good at writing, then you can churn out tech debt filled junk quickly. If you read well, you can see where to add a few lines to get the same result. If you only write well, you copy/paste stackoverflow answers without really knowing what's going on. If you read well, the stackoverflow is simply a starting point you modify or discard entirely because you can recognize junk. Or even that the top rated answer is actually not the best one.
This is a great point. Reading code is such an important skill and how most of an engineers time will be spent. The ability to reason about code that was written by someone else (including your past self) and update/expand it in a clean/maintainable way is a better indicator of success IMO then writing a little chunk of code that solves a brain teaser.
Read code, explain what it does and discuss how you would expand it to add additional functionality or fix a bug. I feel that would be a better approach than most of the current leetcode style interviews.
Too bad I only have one upvote. You have an excellent point, and one I’ve been mulling over for some time now without being able to put into words. I’m definitely going to give it a try at our next hiring round
I highly agree with this. When I was in position where I had to interview candidates this is was the 2nd half of my technical interview. Read a piece of code and going through it with me like you're pairing with Jr. Dev. I still think algorithm problems serve the purpose of filtering out the bottom of the barrel.
The interview should be all about READING code. The original reason for writing code during an interview was to filter those who can't code. And so problems like fizzbuzz were created and that expanded into leetcode. But does anyone really think that if you ask someone to read a moderately complex piece of code and they can fully explain what it's doing, they can't write a simple for loop? If you can read code, then you can write code. And reading code during an interview if far less stressful than writing. So you will get much higher signal from the interviews since the stress of writing code during an interview causes many good engineers to do poorly. Or never try at all since they don't have time to practice to the point where the stress doesn't matter because it's rote memory.
Reading code is also better at showing the difference between a junior and senior engineer. If a junior or senior crams leetcode and spits it out during an interview, the result will look the same and you really don't know if they are junior or senior. But reading code is where years of experience can really shine.
And I want to stress again, reading code is so important, I think more so than writing. If you're only good at writing, then you can churn out tech debt filled junk quickly. If you read well, you can see where to add a few lines to get the same result. If you only write well, you copy/paste stackoverflow answers without really knowing what's going on. If you read well, the stackoverflow is simply a starting point you modify or discard entirely because you can recognize junk. Or even that the top rated answer is actually not the best one.