If you go by Joel Spolsky’s simple interview criteria - smart and get things done and think about the two characteristics in a quadrant. “Whether you can reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard” as the filter, completely optimizes for the “smart” and doesn’t test at all whether you can “get things done”.
I’ve interviewed and hired software engineers at small companies where we needed each software developer to be impactful. We needed someone with history of “getting things done”. We can’t tell that by your ability to do leetCode.
On a side note, an Amazon recruiter reached out to me about a software developer position on LinkedIn a few months ago. I knew I had no interest in going through an algorithm interview to prove I was “smart”.
I asked her could she put me in touch with someone from the AWS consulting side since I did have experience with “getting things done” from working for small companies in general and using many of the AWS fiddly bits specifically.
As I suspected, the entire loop was concerned with past projects and “tell me about a time when...”. I breezed through the interview without a single algorithm question even though I am actually doing some hands on the keyboard coding - implementations not sales.
I’ve interviewed and hired software engineers at small companies where we needed each software developer to be impactful. We needed someone with history of “getting things done”. We can’t tell that by your ability to do leetCode.
On a side note, an Amazon recruiter reached out to me about a software developer position on LinkedIn a few months ago. I knew I had no interest in going through an algorithm interview to prove I was “smart”.
I asked her could she put me in touch with someone from the AWS consulting side since I did have experience with “getting things done” from working for small companies in general and using many of the AWS fiddly bits specifically.
As I suspected, the entire loop was concerned with past projects and “tell me about a time when...”. I breezed through the interview without a single algorithm question even though I am actually doing some hands on the keyboard coding - implementations not sales.