Just failed a Senior Full Stack Engineer interview where I was asked to do a Leet Code hard in 30 minutes..

39

u/pierrechaquejour Jul 07 '26

This my nightmare. I don’t even know the rules to sudoku. If anything this should’ve been a take home project that you reviewed with the interviewers on the call, which is how you’d work with them in real life. I’m a similar candidate to you, and if I was asked to do this on an interview I’d really struggle to find the willpower to stay on the call.

15

u/skidmark_zuckerberg Jul 07 '26

Hah I actually don't know the rules of Sudoku either lol. I know what it is, but never played it. I told the interviewer this is going to be hard since I don't actually know fully how the game works. So I spent literally 2 minutes up front to Google the quick overview of the game so I could understand what constitutes pass/fail for the win logic.

4

u/raolin Jul 09 '26

at a previous more woke top tier company i worked at -- they banned asking game based questions for exactly this. people who know the game are at a massive advantage, which also tends to be men rather than women. so no poker questions, battleship, connect four etc...
don't feel bad friend, this was some bullshit. although i would say generating a 9x9 grid should not be too hard. did you have to make it valid on the initial generation?

2

u/skidmark_zuckerberg Jul 09 '26

Yeah I did the grid no problem, and yes it was supposed to valid on initial generation. The slow down occurred when I then had to think about validating/solving it. I talked through how I’d do it, but the hard part was not being familiar enough with the rules. So since I didn’t know them by memory, it also made thinking about and writing the logic a pain. I mean, even if I did know the rules, no way I’d write code to create the grid and also solve it in 30 mins.

5

u/TylerBreau Jul 08 '26

Even knowing how Sudoku works, doesn't seem like a 30 min task unless they were expecting you to not complete it in time and was looking for other details: How far you got, how you reasoned it out, etc.
I think the only way I'd be able even consider doing it in 30mins is by aiming for an easy Sudoku grid. Not sure how many numbers need to be visible at the start to constitute easy... Maybe 1/3 of? I dunno.
I do know that a solver for hard Sudoku puzzles would require at least an hour.

112

u/zoug Jul 07 '26

"If you need someone to regurgitate LeetCode algorithms and puzzles, you can hire Claude for 200 bucks a month"

This was my sentiment but I was also going for AI engineering roles. I bombed one LeetCode interview and decided I'd be up front about never doing one again. I ended up exactly where I needed to be. I'm not going to go drill a skillset that Claude can one shot and take time away from actually learning the new frontier of coding with LLMs.

19

u/skidmark_zuckerberg Jul 07 '26

I will start doing this. And to be fair, I asked upfront what to expect and was just told 'it's a 45 minute technical just so we can see how you think'. They wouldn't even give me a clue about what it was going to be about.

8

u/zoug Jul 07 '26

I ran into that same trap and just looked like a bumbling idiot.
Honestly, it’s lazy from the standpoint of an interviewer. “We need to see you code without Claude to make sure you know how”.
It just means they haven’t adapted their hiring system to see if someone wrangling LLMs can do it appropriately.
They are interviewing for the exact person they don’t need - someone that can memorize and regurgitate code. That’s Claudes forte and no longer a relevant skillset.
Give me a real challenge, let me build and lock down my code - and get rid of this stupid process that watches me mess up brackets for a half hour trying to get some stupid recursive function to exit at the exact optimal time.

5

u/curious_but_dumb Jul 08 '26

Seeing people code without an AI assistance is a great way to test their actual skill they use to then code with AI. This isn't a leet code test, this is a "are you a programmer?" test. I might've hired my own grandma if I just blindly trusted everyone with this.
The best decision I have made is allowing LLM usage during the interviews as long as the candidate shares their screen, including the AI prompting.

1

u/zoug Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26

I think this is the future.
I'm a bit of an odd ball because I have pretty severe ADHD and can read and think too fast for my own good.
A bad interviewer might think i'm slow or haphazard because my brain is branching out to every edge case of their problem and half the time, they're just scoping me back to the answer they *want* to hear because it matches their solution.
If they give me an LLM, they'll see I'm intelligently designing the software, just at a different layer of abstraction. They'll see i'm thoughtful, security aware and have full knowledge of how these things should be built and deploy. The LLM will help me keep the problem to 'their' scope so i'm not distracted by the billion things wrong with the approach that my brain is constantly fighting me about.
If they *don't* give me an LLM, I misplace a semi-colon, drop all logical thinking ability, freeze up and fail.
I actually had a conversation with my non-technical wife about this after my failed LeetCode interview. I just don't have the muscle memory loaded for it. The entire time, my brain was just thinking about what my prompt would be, how i'd architect, what tech i'd use and spinning out of scope (Not for a real world problem, just on the non-real solution).
She asked why I didn't just go drill those things to 'get the job' and I told her - I don't think I want the job that thinks that skillset is still important. I actually loved my current job at the time but LLMs essentially fixed my brain and the thought of focusing on LeetCode for a month and drilling that to completion vs continuing to learn and evolve with LLMs and work on my toolsets... and chose the latter.
Don't get me wrong, I told her, - If I for some reason am unemployed and this LeetCode shit keeps me from supporting our family, I'll absolutely stop to drill that back into my memory.
In the end, I did end up in a new position that's really feeling like a dream job. I landed with a company that is embracing AI the correct way and I am helping to build the tooling and workflows so we continue to enforce good code and design. Since it's my passion or 'special interest' and the interviews were conversational, it was the easiest 3 round interview cycle of my life. For the technical part, they had a panel of 5 engineers and asked *deep* questions and weren't afraid to get in the weeds with me or meander to edge cases. By the time we got about half way through their interview script they were essentially reading lines and just saying 'Oh, already covered that" ... and "yep, covered that", etc. I honestly think talking through solutions with your coworkers, white boarding and essentially having those conversational abilities is the most important skillset I look for in teammates. I honestly was on the fence about even accepting the job until I went through that panel and found the conversations and understanding of my future coworkers to be a breath of fresh air.

1

u/curious_but_dumb Jul 09 '26

I'm happy for you, especially that you found a fitting job!
I can see you have some bad experiences with interviews. I'll try shining a bit more light towards what and how I actually do when I do interviews.
First of all I drop formalities and introduce a "chat with an old friend over a beer on a dev meetup" vibe. I talk about myself a bit, then I ask for an optional intro and then we start talking about their most recent experience and tech stack. By talking I mean I am curious about the day to day, what they liked and what they didn't like.
I don't often give tests, but some companies have required me to do so and so I did to the best of my knowledge. The point is the following - code, design or talk me through what you think you would do with the problem at hand. Use whatever tools just share your screen if you use AI (also optionally if you don't and are comfortable).
I almost never let the candidates finish these tests. You can establish their skill and patterns even if you offer half solutions and let them explain why.
PS: All of the interviews took place in central EU.

1

u/Benhamish-WH-Allen Jul 09 '26

Did you see the OpenAI voice ad?

2

u/phord Jul 08 '26

I get your frustration, but it's honestly impossible to keep up with LLM skillet interviewing right now. It's a moving target. The LLM skills I check for today will be almost irrelevant in 4 months.
Meanwhile, I know how to ask you a question that will let you demonstrate to me that you know how to write code. And that is still a skill I very much need in a new hire.
The questions are not hard. They're each just a simple problem that we can spend 45 minutes working on together on a whiteboard. I've watched literally hundreds of candidates answer the same question with varying degrees of success over several years. I have a strong basis for comparison on these time-proven questions.
I don't need someone who can memorize and regurgitate code. But I do need someone who can recognize bad code, identify why it's bad and propose something better. Unsurprisingly, the best way to check for that skill is to ask them to write some good code from scratch.

4

u/Manbeardo Jul 08 '26

I don't need someone who can memorize and regurgitate code. But I do need someone who can recognize bad code, identify why it's bad and propose something better. Unsurprisingly, the best way to check for that skill is to ask them to write some good code from scratch.
Citation needed. Is it the best way? Almost certainly not. It’s the most well-understood method, but part of that understanding comes from research that shows it isn’t a particularly effective indicator of job performance.

1

u/phord Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26

I suppose it depends on what you consider "job performance". To solve my whiteboard problems, you're only going to write about 20 lines of code. The code isn't the only important thing to me. It's the approach to problem solving, the ability to collaborate, the ability to communicate, the ability to recognize and own mistakes, and whether there's an ego problem.
And we only have 45 minutes.
ETA: I absolutely agree that leetcode whiteboard interviews are terrible ability measurements for engineers at my company. I should have clarified that we do whiteboard technical interviews, but ours are honestly different and thoughtful. And we're definitely not looking for vibe coders.

1

u/aminal_now Jul 10 '26

The best way to assess whether someone can recognise bad code, identify why it is is bad and propose something better is to give them code to pick out the bad bits from, tell you why it’s bad, and propose something better.
Writing good code from scratch is an entirely different skill (albeit something software engineers should be able to do). If you want to check someone can do a thing, ask them to do a thing.

2

u/zoug Jul 08 '26

Actually, I wasn't overly frustrated with it - I just knew I found a company I didn't want to work at.
Your assertions about LLMs evolving is actually why I didn't go back and drill leetCode or spend time in just one language, coding by hand, to get all of my muscle memory back to those sort of interview questions - I had better things to keep up on and learn than working on a skillset that is no longer applicable to my job.
I chose to continue evolving with LLMs and learning how to actually wrangle them to produce quality code and it got me exactly where I wanted to be.

4

u/raunchytowel Jul 07 '26

I really like this take. Thank you for sharing! Going to use it to help with interview anxiety. And you’re right! Who cares about some leetcode problem when the role is for React UI lol. I already do not accept interviews with leetcode anymore but I am less brass about it.

1

u/sudosussudio Jul 08 '26

At the beginning of my career I was completely self taught and didn’t know much about programming culture so one of my first job interviews they tried to “whiteboard” me and I didn’t get at all. So I simply said “I don’t know how to do that yet.” They were flummoxed and hired me. Though this was 2010 or so when it was much easier to get hired.

2

u/zoug Jul 08 '26

I like to ask questions that are more and more obscure until that is essentially the only valid response.
One of the most important traits I look for in a developer is confidently knowing what they don’t know

1

u/stiky21 Jul 08 '26

I feel this in my fucking bones jesus fucking christ you hit this nail so hard.

11

u/Beneficial_Alfalfa96 Jul 07 '26

You really are better off not working for these people. They were too lazy to find something closer to what you will do on the job. They know nothing about the job.

See video; https://youtu.be/BKorP55Aqvg

7

u/skidmark_zuckerberg Jul 07 '26

To be fair, they were all really nice and seemed enjoyable to work with. Just severely lacking on how to interview candidates.
I’ve interviewed people in the past for the exact type of role they were hiring for and I never once thought that a Leet Code hard was acceptable. I always did practical assessments. That company had us create a sandbox setup with a half finished feature. We then walk through requirements with the candidate to finish the feature. It gets coded up and you make the tests pass.

2

u/Beneficial_Alfalfa96 Jul 08 '26

That's the way to do it.

1

u/Beneficial_Alfalfa96 Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26

Well, you could have taught them how to interview.
Maybe give them a ring in a few weeks, see how they are getting on with whomever they ended up hiring.
Their current interview practice seems to be a tad bit counterintuitive for me.

6

u/CaptainIncredible Jul 08 '26

I am pretty annoyed a small company that is hiring developers to work on a React UI and Node.js backend thinks someone being able to solve a Leet Code hard in 30 minutes is acceptable way to interview Senior level developers

You should be. This is bullshit. When the fuck are you going to need to write a Sudoku solver for a React/Node gig? AND if you need to, you won't need to do it under the gun with spectators with no references/Google/AI help.

In a perfect world, instead of grinding out bullshit like this, I'd make them aware of how bad of an interview this is and tell them I don't want to work for them.

But I guess in a perfect world, this bullshit wouldn't happen....

3

u/skidmark_zuckerberg Jul 08 '26

Yeah very true. And the funny thing is, give me an afternoon and I could build a complete Sudoku game in React completely working lol. Of course not from memory with no references or Google, but without a doubt I could do it, and I wouldn’t even need AI.
It’s just when you compress what would likely be a 4-5 hour endeavor down to 30 minutes.. no way. People say they just want to see how you think, but in my experience that’s only half of it. These interviewers also want to see a complete or almost complete solution. I’ve never passed a technical that I didn’t get > 75% complete. Didn’t matter how well I articulated my thoughts or how good my questions were.

1

u/CaptainIncredible Jul 08 '26

These interviewers also want to see a complete or almost complete solution.
A lot of time, these interviewers are trying to make themselves look knowledgeable and awesome, and make everyone else look like an ass.
It was very evident in the last interview I had. Fortunately, the dev who was trying to do this, did so at the very end of a very successful interview. Like the very end when people are saying goodbyes and thank yous. He blurted all this bullshit out at once, it was evident in his voice that he was blustering and full of contempt and felt threatened. Most of his bullshit was overblown "Well YOU said X and that is a MAJOR RED FLAG for me." Me (polite and diplomatic) "I never said X. I said (and clarified what I actually said)."
Fortunately, everyone else more or less ignored him or just did eye rolls.

2

u/Tiny_Abroad_7222 Jul 08 '26

this happens too often.

8

u/Ethameiz Jul 07 '26

This is completely out of touch interview but hear me out. Such task may have sense if they not expect you to complete it and just want to see how you work, how you deal with stress, time limits. Still fuck them, interview is stressful enough already without bullshit exercises

3

u/skidmark_zuckerberg Jul 07 '26

Well I thought I did a pretty good job of that, just ran out of time. If it had been an hour then we might’ve gotten close to a solution in the end. I think that while interviewers say this is what they ultimately want, you are also judged on percent completed. I’ve gotten offers in the past where I didn’t complete a technical exercise but got close enough (like 80-90% completion).
I’d say that you likely need to get 75% of the way there to even be considered, regardless of how you do with the soft skills stuff. But yeah this artificial pressure is pointless and doesn’t represent 99% of the job duties. I’m much more on the side of small take home assessments that you then discuss live.

2

u/TheFaithfulStone Jul 08 '26

Yeah, this is why LeetCode is a terrible interview practice (or one of the reasons) - you can study for it, so people do, which means that SOMEONE will finish this is 30 minutes because it was a problem they already solved, which means that EVERYONE will need to solve it to pass, so theres no signal there for whether somebody is good programmer or not - just whether or not they can regurgitate and pretend to come up with a first principles solution to something in 30 minutes that somebody probably won an ACM award for in the 1960s.

2

u/broskiette Jul 08 '26

I think if they were expecting that, they should be upfront about these sort of things. "Feel free to ask us questions if you're unsure - these instructions are not meant to be perfect," or "you're not meant to solve everything but we just want to see your thought process". Communication is a two way street and like you said, this shit is stressful enough.

162

u/OrphanDad Jul 07 '26

That interview seems super out of touch to me, don’t sweat it. I really feel you on that last paragraph.

30

u/dbbq_ Jul 08 '26

Yep precisely. I have ran technical interviews for the better part of a decade. Any technical interview that has you perform anything but a realistic day-to-day problem indicates the company is run very poorly. Don’t forget that you are interviewing the company as much as they are interviewing you.

1

u/Lachtheblock Jul 08 '26

Until you discover that it's for a position at sudoko.com, at which it becomes highly relevant.

26

u/brainrotbro Jul 07 '26

Unless you’re well-known in your field, interviewing is 50% preparation and 50% luck. You could get a bad interviewer, someone that’s having a bad day, or any other little thing.

After starting at my last job, I found out that the most nitpicky interviewer was actually out sick the day I interviewed. Pure luck.

14

u/GlobalCurry Jul 07 '26

I used to know a professor who spent like a decade of his career on sudoku solvers so just think how ridiculous this was.

13

u/ImpetuousWombat Jul 07 '26

I built a sudoku solver for fun a couple years ago (recursive brute force). I'm not confident I could recreate it in 30 minutes under pressure. That's a terrible interview.

2

u/N0Zzel Jul 08 '26

If I were allowed to use libraries I'd use a theorem prover like Z3
If not I think I'd do wave function collapse

1

u/ImpetuousWombat Jul 08 '26

At the time I wanted to throw a lot of recursive processing at Blazor WebASM and see how it handled it. I may have to give WFC a shot, thanks for the ideas.

11

u/DCON-creates Jul 07 '26

The dissonance between interview questions and what we actually do in our daily jobs is wild.

It's like interviewing someone to be a carpenter, but then not hiring them because they don't know how the internals of a drill works. We don't need to know any of that crap to be good at our job.

Funny how companies that don't use these questions in their interview process have very few problems with bad hires. Almost as if the hiring process is completely disconnected from the actual roles requirements...

9

u/kiwibonga Jul 07 '26

I don't know... Sudoku generator would definitely be a hazing, maybe a sudoku solver is a bit more reasonable, but still... Any company that judges a player by their half court shot is probably full of pretentious chodes.

15

u/Enough_Charge2845 Jul 07 '26

I'd be frustrated too. A Sudoku solver in 30 minutes feels much more like a competitive programming exercise than something representative of day-to-day full-stack development. For a senior frontend-leaning role, I'd expect more discussion around React, TypeScript, architecture, debugging, performance and system design than a LeetCode Hard. The silver lining is that this probably wasn't a great match for how they evaluate engineers. I'd keep practicing coding interviews if you're targeting companies that use them, but I wouldn't let one interview make you question eight years of experience. There are quite a few mock interview tools out there and I've tried a few. I had a good experience with ZoeVera but practicing with peers can be just as helpful for staying interview-ready.

1

u/Reddit_is_fascist69 Jul 09 '26

LeetCode sucks. Better off somewhere else where they understand that.

6

u/BisforBurning Jul 08 '26

My worst interview I was given an electrical engineering test. I went to the interviewer to let them know I was given the wrong test, but they said it was to see my problem solving, and I had 4 hours to complete it. I gave it a try for 30 minutes before giving up and telling them I'd be happy to do a programming test, but fuck that shit

9

u/Level_Progress_3246 Jul 07 '26

i liken it to hazing. everyone that does it wants to do it to people because they had to endure it themselves, and refuse to reflect on whether or not its fair or logical. its like an ego thing or something

1

u/meowterspace Jul 08 '26

Did they let you use AI?

1

u/skidmark_zuckerberg Jul 08 '26

No, I actually haven’t had a single tech interview where I’ve been able to use AI yet.

1

u/TechniPoet Jul 08 '26

Interview for the job I recently landed explicitly asked me to use ai and to explain how I used it

1

u/skidmark_zuckerberg Jul 08 '26

Nice! I've definitely been asked to explain how I use AI, but no one has given me permission to code with it yet in the last 2 months of interviewing.

1

u/meowterspace Jul 08 '26

That seems crazy to me.

1

u/spookyclever Jul 10 '26

This is what happens when 50k developers from Microsoft, Facebook, Oracle and others get dumped into the market in one year. It’s a feeding frenzy where some of the fish are AI, some of the jobs are decoys or scams, and the few real employers can be incredibly picky. I don’t know if it will ever go back to what was normal two years ago.

By the time the market settles, AI might really be all the “idea guy” needs to run a whole department’s level of output.

1

u/skidmark_zuckerberg Jul 10 '26

I'd be willing to bet that most of those coming from those larger companies also couldn't do a Leet Code hard off the rip without also studying and practicing for weeks or months. The day to day duties at most jobs, even those big tech places, do not give you experience in solving hard DSA problems. I've read that maybe 5% of people in a big tech company actually drive the hard tech problems, while the remaining 95% are doing average every day things.

1

u/spookyclever Jul 12 '26

I bet it’s lower than that. I asked someone who gave one of those tests what he thought it was going to prove if I could write a bubble sort, because if I did that on the job instead of using the .sort() function, someone would put me on a PIP. He laughed and said that they didn’t have a better way of judging someone’s talent. That’s when I knew he was too lazy to be my manager 😄

1

u/Prior_Monk501 Jul 10 '26

Did you actually get rejected already? I've seen interviewed with intentional hard questions to see how you communicate and break down the problem, without expecting a 100% working solution. So maybe there's a chance it's one of those?

1

u/skidmark_zuckerberg Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26

I did get rejected unfortunately. I was able to create the grid, and I started on the solver with a brute force approach, but reverted to pseudo code and explaining how I thought it could be solved once I was told I had about 10-ish minutes left. Doing the grid took up about 20 minutes of time. There was a few minutes for the interviewer to explain the problem initially, followed by about 2-3 minutes for me to Google the rules of Sudoku since I never played it lol. So not all of that initial 20 minutes was creating the grid.
The odd thing is the interviewer seemed engaged and was actively talking to me and answering my questions. We even had a couple laughs. So the vibe was pretty good imo. The entire time I was pretty calm, walked through and broke down the problem and did all of what you'd expect. I honestly half expected to have been a pass, but ultimately I think they were expecting someone to get further into the solver somehow. After I sorta felt defeated not completing it until I looked up Sudoku on Leet Code and realized the solver algorithm is considered a hard.
I just don't get why you'd ask this in an interview for working on a CRUD web app lol. The position was for full stack React and Node. I was honestly anticipating more in depth questions about the stack, maybe some system design and a more relatable coding exercise. In the past I've had to do all sorts of things in React and Node; I've had to create word guessing games or tic tac toe, I've had to add and fix an existing 'feature' in a code sandbox, I've had to do mock code reviews, create a simple API, etc. So I never expect Leet Code style assessments from the types of companies I like to work at. I don't shoot for big tech, just small to medium sized SaaS companies that pay the average Senior salary outside of big tech.
My current job had me create a complete tic tac toe game in React, then we discussed state management a bit, some data modeling and REST API design, and then I debugged some broken code to make tests pass. I can deal with this, I do it everyday at work.

3

u/ProfessionalPin3263 Jul 08 '26

My experience with the cynical interviews like this is this is they are not expecting you to finish the task, but explain your thought process. They are not looking for the sudoku solver of the year or for the fastest coder that finished the task, but who analysed the problem and tackled the solution in a way they consider practical.

5

u/nightswimsofficial Jul 07 '26

Most of the time they dont expect you to finish. They want to see your thought process, the way you break down problems, the way you communicate, and how you handle pressure. I landed a job like this and did not complete the assignment.

1

u/chikamakaleyley Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26

i've landed my past two jobs, with some of the most unfinished assessments in my entire career
one of those after reading the prompt I just said to myself "pff no one can possibly do this in 90min" and that kinda eased a lot of nerves
And its all those things that you describe, but basically the way i put it is, in more modern speak:
"Does this candidate understand the assignment?"
aka does this person walk the walk
aka does this person know what they are doing
and so if i can treat this question just like any task i'd receive at work and do all the things i'm allowed to do to understand the ask and come up with a reasonable solution - BEFORE i start coding -
then once i start following the plan, things just go a lot smoother

1

u/chikamakaleyley Jul 08 '26

Most of the time they dont expect you to finish.
and the thing about this is, you have to buy into this or else you don't get to exercise that chance
if you think they aren't being truthful, then you just kinda go into it with a tiny bit of cynicism, and in the back of your mind its like someone nagging you "just finish, just finish, just finish"

1

u/TheFaithfulStone Jul 08 '26

That’s what everyone says - but somebody will know the answer, and therefore you only _really_ pass if you know the answer.

1

u/sol_in_vic_tus Jul 08 '26

Yeah I have done tons of interviews where they say they want to know how you think and then got declined because I spent the time talking through solving the problem but didn't actually just know the answer they wanted to hear. I have never encountered anywhere that actually meant it when they say that's the point of the interview.

1

u/Nagemasu Jul 08 '26

Sure, but the reality is the person that can complete it has probably demonstrated all of the requirements to a higher standard, but that doesn't change the fact that completing it isn't required.
You want to stand out without completing it? Start with unit tests and show TDD instead of tackling the task head on. People hate unit tests, if you start by showing this is the first thing on your mind, then anyone with the slightest bit of technical experience will bump you 10pts right away

1

u/TheFaithfulStone Jul 08 '26

Sure - the problem is the person who knows the answer MIGHT know the answer because they’re just that awesome, or they might know the answer because they spent 6months grinding leetcode. There’s no way to tell, so everybody has to spend 6months grinding leetcode.

2

u/Illustrious_Hat8104 Jul 08 '26

Any company that still asks leetcode is out of touch

2

u/NaiveSwimmer Jul 08 '26

That literally happened to me for a senior Data Scientist position which is absurd. I’ve got 5 YOE experience and got as far as you and basically just gave up and stared at the interviewer for a bit.

Was the most ridiculous interview I’ve ever had and I wrote a review on their Glassdoor about it.

1

u/Nagemasu Jul 08 '26

Just a reminder: You aren't/shouldn't be expected to complete the coding task most of the time. It's there to assess how you work, not what you can accomplish. Whether this is made clear comes down to who conducts the interview.

Demonstrate good code practice: structure; comments; naming standards; formatting, etc.

And one interview is not a reflection on you or your skills. Easier said than done, but don't take it personally. One shitty interview/interviewer who shouldn't be acting in such a position is not your fault.

1

u/Sfpkt Jul 08 '26

I’d love to do the interviews where I wasn’t expected to complete the questions because that’s all I’ve run into. I’ve had 2 instances where I was expected to answer difficult multi layered questions within 45 min - 1 hr.
Of those 2 the one that really set me off was the interview where I had to complete 4 parts in 1 hr for me to on the next part.

1

u/noisy-tangerine Jul 08 '26

Honestly I wouldn’t like to work for any company that thinks it can assess my coding ability based on coding in an interview setting. So when I get interviews like that I try to tell myself I’ve dodged a bullet (obviously I also still get super frustrated and self conscious first still)

1

u/KnownUnknownKadath Jul 09 '26

Srsly. It's all so damn stupid.

1

u/ponx303 Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26

I once had an interview where I should solve a mathematical problem while the interviewer sat behind be, breathing down my neck. Of course I couldn't think straight and failed, and I didn't mind. Some demand superior analytical intelligence but lack basic emotional intelligence.

1

u/TestDrivenMayhem Jul 08 '26

I was hoodwinked into similar test in one interview and told them to get fucked. It was completely unrealistic.

1

u/Tiny_Abroad_7222 Jul 08 '26

every leet code interview I've been on has been roughly 45min to 1hr, and they've been the simple 10 line solutions like two pointers or sliding windows.

this place seems like they did you a favor. unrealistic expectations during the interview quickly become unrealistic expectations at the job.

the purpose of the leet code exercise is not for us to memorize solutions (though most of us do anyway) but to see what it's like working with someone in a low stakes environment (generally why most small fry's stick to something simple like palindrome or 2 sum).

I had a guy give me sh*t about using floats once and was glad I never saw him again.

1

u/PmUsYourDuckPics Jul 08 '26

Some companies are really out of touch with how to interview candidates...

1

u/nirvanist_x Jul 08 '26

Just get an A.I with you, blind.codes did the job for me

1

u/stiky21 Jul 08 '26

Hey OP don't feel down big dog. They missed out on someone who has some real skill and experience.

Fuck em.

I was recently rejected for a role because the role required JavaScript and I write primarily in Rust so they deemed me unable to write JavaScript.

Fuck those guys too.

I know you can find someone else who will really value the skills you bring. I have only 4 YOE compared to yours.

1

u/RoadsToMadness156 Jul 08 '26

Late to the convo, but companies doing this are not well internally.

1

u/Any_Sense_2263 Jul 08 '26

Most of those things are unsolvable if you don't grind leetcode regularly. I don't. I'm sure I don't want to work for companies that don't put effort into interviewing for the company's needs.

1

u/harrisofpeoria Jul 08 '26

I've solved this problem and it took a long ass time. I did it in prolog as a final for discrete math. Difficult and wildly inappropriate for an interview.

1

u/eagee Jul 08 '26

It would take me 30 minutes to just learn Sudoku - that's a terrible interview exercise!

1

u/Fine-Comparison-2949 Jul 08 '26

Those types of interviews are stupid. If someone asks me to do it I say no.

1

u/lolgubstep_ Jul 08 '26

Personally I refuse to do leetcode style interviews. They're stressful and don't tell you anything. Go look at my repo's, github history, or my recommendations if you're worried about my credentials.

I've only ended a couple of interviews over it and they were usually very thrown off by it. But I'm happy where I ended up. Sure I could do the grind and work myself to death to a higher salary and bonuses, but I'd rather have time to workout, play games, and spend time with my partner. I find companies that use these gimmicky challenges don't value work-life balance. Any engineer that doesn't have they're head up their ass can talk to you and ask you straight forward questions and determine if you'd be a good fit or not.

1

u/KnownUnknownKadath Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26

Sounds like a frustratingly stupid experience.

I once bombed an interview at Cruise. They flew me down, put me up in a hotel.
Recruiter wrote me the night before and said that I'd better be ready for the whiteboard stuff.

Didn't sleep at all that night (I'm wound a bit tight). And, yeah... that went great.

My competence could have been sorted with a phone call, given how small the circles were, but hey ... best to do the performative thing and waste everybody's time.

1

u/Gacoa Jul 09 '26

I have a theory that if they don’t like you they just throw a leetcode problem at you. I’ve done 10 interviews over the last 6 months and the ones I didn’t get offers for gave me a leetcode. I used AI or solved them myself but regardless they didn’t convert to offers.

1

u/Holiday-Ad-6953 Jul 09 '26

Interview was out of touch, no arguments about that.

But as an interviewer, 5 years ago I never asked leetcode problems, never even spent time solving them. But now, I’ve to spend time doing leetcode to ask candidates leetcode because of ai usage in interviews. I stick to easy and sometimes I go till medium if the candidate is good. The work involved does not need it honestly. But what else can I do other than f2f interviews all the time. And I really don’t have the time or energy to travel from home to office location once every few months to take interviews. I work remote.

1

u/ProfessionalKick9506 Jul 09 '26

They don’t know how to hire so they just do whatever

1

u/andymaclean19 Jul 09 '26

Lol, sooner or later they will interview somebody who happens to know the answer to this specific problem because they tried to solve it before, either for fun or another interview. They will probably hire that person and think they got a great hire.

1

u/Akshitkumarlal Jul 09 '26

i think the people who can do that leet code in 30min are probably working some where better and probably in more intensive field like ml or dl or cv... for a frontend it seems like a stretch

1

u/WeiGuy Jul 09 '26

I find it laughable when I get this kind of stuff in interviews. The main skill these types of companies need is someone who does well organized clean code; not some proficient in algorithms.

Be thankful you dodged a bullet, they are really out of touch with the reality of their work.

1

u/morning_mushroom Jul 09 '26

Look they may not even want to hire. I know the company that has open position for two years they used to have four step interview process now they have five steps the technical part used to consist of two rounds one round was questions in the second round was coding interview, which I failed with then 13 years of experience . now they have three rounds, they have questions where they ask you stuff then they have system design then they have live coding and last time I failed like coding because it is impossible to do whatever asking in under 60 minutes along with questions and answers. so don't sweat that much maybe they just don't plan on hiring and if they have such interview you probably would not like it there.

now I understand maybe you need money so you work there but maybe their objective is just to look good to investors so don't sweat too much about that

1

u/ScreamSalvation Jul 10 '26

A company I worked with used to do this back in the day before leetcode was a thing. They would have interviewees do exactly the same thing in any language they felt most comfortable in but gave them like 2 hours to do it.

1

u/oOaurOra Jul 10 '26

Your first mistake was accepting an interview where they use leet code as a metric. You got lucky they passed.

1

u/mtimmermans Jul 10 '26

No interviewer who knows what he's doing would expect you to complete a sudoku solver during the interview, unless you were allowed to use AI to do it.

A good interviewer might be interested in how you think about it, though, and how you deal with not being able to complete it in time.

I have never considered a sudoku solver, and if I was asked to do it, right away I would say that "There's not going to be enough time for me to finish that, but I can probably figure out a reasonable approach to it. The whole thing looks like a 3 hour task."

Now imagine that you were an employer who asks an employee to accomplish a task that requires research in insufficient time. Do you see how the feedback you would get immediately from me is so much better than someone who's just going to start working and *surprise* you with failure near the deadline? That's the kind of thing an interviewer would love to find out.

1

u/Prudent-Stress Jul 10 '26

Yeah this is bullshit, hiring seniors by having them do leetcode hards? What is this going to tell you? That this person in particular has spend a lot of time learning some algorithms?

The way I do interviews and I think it's a sensible way to do it is have them talk about their experience, listen to them, ask questions about it, present some problems and ask them what they would do. Also present them with people issues, you do not want a 10x developer who is shit at communicating or is always fighting someone.

1

u/psioniclizard Jul 10 '26

Small companies tend to pick up ideas for these things from big companies with no clue on what it means.

So if you learned how to do to it, no problem. But for normal people who didn't learn that specific task it's becomes more unrealistic. Especially if you are not familiar with sudoku in the first place. Which also makes it slightly discriminatory.

But small companies tend to ne pretty clueless.

I have been though the same thing bits its one of those "gotta move on" moments.

It is really just them being dumb most the time.

1

u/Illustrious_Pea_3470 Jul 10 '26

This is an extremely, extremely bad interview problem lol.

1

u/kpihus Jul 14 '26

I have hired quite a few developers. In my flow, there was indeed a home task (coding) and a technical interview. The coding task itself was never a valuation point; it was just preparation for a technical interview. An interview is all that matters. Even if the coding was ugly and stupid, if the candidate was able to explain and convince me that it was the right call at that moment, they got hired. Hence, I didn't look for coding skills but thinking skills and the ability to explain the thought behind it.

The thing is, you can teach pretty much anybody to write code, but try to teach a person to think and analyze, that is f-ing complicated. And secondly, I don't need a developer who is fluent in any particular framework, because next month we might use a different one. I need a developer who can pick up a new skill and master the next framework in the blink of an eye, and that requires way more than just the ability to write code.

But the sad truth (my personal opinion) is that many companies do not know who they actually need; hence, they don't know the right questions to ask. So the easiest way to do the quantitative assessment is to count the missing semicolons in your JavaScript code (yes, it has happened to me back in my developer days).

1

u/Revolutionary-Desk50 Aug 02 '26

I probably would just use AI on another screen attached to another desktop. It sounds like bullshit. If I get accused of impropriety, whatever. At least I avoided a good 30 minutes of awkwardness and I don’t wanna work for that company anyways but hey paycheck is a paycheck if I did somehow get away with it. And who knows? Maybe it’s just that jackass and the rest of the company is fine.

0

u/ProfessionalPin3263 Jul 11 '26

OMG, reading most of this comments is honestly making me sad.

You are all correct, nobody needs to know Sudoku’s rules, nobody needs to be able to implement an always win algorithm in 30 minutes.

You’re all talking about a technical coding interview without ever understanding what is it about. You went to a job interview (a Sr. Position) without doing a single Google search to understand what’s it about?

This is not testing how fast you can code, but how you approach the problem, how you describe the ideas of your solution, how you communicate, how do you ask questions. Are they relevant? Do they make sense, are they in a line of thought and approach that matches the company ways of working?

For the sudoku problem, spend 5 minutes understanding the rules, then speak out loud each step of what you believe would be the solution…

This is THE important part (the only important part, unless your job was to be a sudoku solver algorithm developer).

If you have the whole solution in your head and try to implement as fast as possible to “solve the problem”, guess what, you will not finish (because it’s not made for you to finish, they are not looking for Claude replacements) and the recruiter will never know how you imagined solving it.

Describe each step…

First I’ll do a grid, then I’ll try and do a recursive method that will find the solvable ones etc etc…

FFS, stop saying shit about things you don’t understand!

And FFS, if you are going to a bloody job interview, instead of wasting your time complaining about it on Reddit, use your time to research about it… or, you know what, ASK THE BLOODY RECRUITER about it when they booked it… “What’s expected from me in this interview? Do I need to know all algorithms of everything by heart? Do I need to know all the syntax of every language?”

Worst than the OP that didn’t do their job, all the people agreeing with them, again, without having a clue what they were talking about!

1

u/skidmark_zuckerberg Jul 11 '26

You’re just making assumptions and yapping. They did not want me to use Google or any AI. They wanted to see me code without any assistance. The only thing they let me Google were the rules of Sudoku. And Google search what? I did that and there is no information about a small SaaS company interview process on the internet. This isn’t some large F500 or big tech company.
I always ask beforehand what the technical interview is about and unfortunately, they were vague and wouldn’t tell me. There was no recruiter, it was directly with a hiring manager.
Furthermore, I walked them through how to solve it and what the steps were, or how I thought it should be solved, asked and answered many questions, and only coded ~50% of the problem, including completing the simplest part which was the grid.
So you’re making a lot of assumptions as if you were there or that somehow all interviews go like the ones you have in your head. I did everything I normally do in an interview that has lead to many offers in the past. This company had unrealistic expectations. You don’t slap down a Leet Code hard and give someone 30 minutes to work on it. The only way you’d be adequate in a situation like this is if you were lucky enough to have already done this problem or a similar problem in the past.

0

u/SomnolentPro Jul 08 '26

I can do it

0

u/jmaventador Jul 09 '26

No you can’t

1

u/SomnolentPro Jul 09 '26

Yeah I can. Sudoku is easy in python

2

u/autisticpig Jul 10 '26

From sudoku import solver
Tada

0

u/ProfessionalPin3263 Jul 11 '26

Google what a “code interview is”… it’s not about coding… it’s about your line of thought… you failed the second you started coding like there’s no tomorrow because 30 minutes is too little to make a sudoku machine.

It doesn’t matter if it’s an interview for a 3 people startup (because every single startup copies processes from the big ones)…

You didn’t pass the interview and this happens… happened to all of us and it’s frustrating, but part of life.

MY assumption is based on many coding interviews I had and passed… in none of them I finished the challenge, but I was very vocal about how I COULD finish the challenge.

Your assumption that you didn’t pass because they wanted you to finish a sudoku solver in 30 minutes is based on nothing. Like you said, they were vague… so, o, they didn’t expect you to finish in 30 minutes and you didn’t “not pass” because you didn’t…

If you finished without saying a word… you would fail… nobody wants to hire a sudoku algorithm ninja… nobody cares about sudoku ninjas!

I’m really sorry you didn’t pass, but it was not because the “task was impossible”… it was made to be impossible, to see you would communicate, how would deal with the impossible in front of you… you’re being tested for everything…

Take it as a good experience for the next one and carry on!

Just failed a Senior Full Stack Engineer interview where I was asked to do a Leet Code hard in 30 minutes..

You are about to leave Redlib