The topic set is very different and the conditions are very artificial. There are many engineers who are amazing, but are absolute shit about writing code, under pressure, while someone is looking over their shoulder, to a leetcode medium that they haven't practiced for. Their brains go blank.
Like seriously, go to leetcode, pick a random medium+ problem and solve it within 15-30m without bugs under pressure, on coderpad, without code execution or being allowed to look up syntax. Make sure you've never seen or been asked the question before. Now do 10 more. You'll see it's something you need to practice for specifically. Make sure you throw in a few binary search questions while you do it.
Anybody going for a leetcode interview without doing prep work first is not a good candidate to start with.
I coached a newly minted PhD engineer into spending 3 weeks studying leetcode prep materials before the interview, telling him that per-hour it would be the best investment of his career. Shockingly, he listened, studied for 3 weeks, and absolutely nailed it. And landed the big bucks job, too.
> Their brains go blank
Anyone with a degree has undergone exams that were critical to graduation. I know all about time pressure, high stakes exams. After all, I attended Caltech. I learned how to deal with them. Study the material beforehand, work all the problem sets beforehand, make sure you have it cold backwards and forwards. That's the cure for brain freeze.
Going in without prep for a $250,000 job interview is just lazy, no matter how smart or capable you are.
A crackerjack programmer that cannot learn leetcode is not a crackerjack programmer.
Just for fun, I found among my dad's papers the written tests he had to pass before he could even sit in the cockpit of an F-86 Sabrejet. They were quite comprehensive and full of minutia. For damn sure the AF wasn't going to let anyone fly one of those monsters without proving they could study and learn everything about them by heart. No excuses about brain freeze is going to fly (pun intended).
One day, he was flying along in his F-86 over the Arizona desert when the engine conked out. He radioed the situation to the tower, who advised him to bail out. But he knew how to figure out hour far he could fly given his speed, altitude, weight of the fuel, wind speed, etc. and calculated that he could make the strip. And he did, with a few feet to spare.
There's no way I would even dare fly one without mastering all that stuff, either.
> calculated that he could make the strip. And he did, with a few feet to spare.
Stories like that give me goosebumps. Your dad has (had? if so, I'm sorry) just absolute balls of steel. Not to mention an incredible mind. Thank you for sharing.
Yes, because flying a war jet under pressure and landing it in the desert is the same as writing software over 5 months in an office. /s
Test anxiety is real. Anxiety disorders are real in general, not to mention ADHD, autism and more where these disabilities can interact in bad ways in interviews. It does not mean that people with these issues are bad engineers. If your instrument is inaccurate, it does not mean the thing it is measuring is wrong.
One of the best and smartest engineers I have ever hired had visible anxiety and objectively did not pass the interview but we pushed for it anyway and was hired as a jr engineer. He is a staff engineer now, leads various large company library projects and is the go to expert about various systems in the entire company and will probably become a sr staff engineer. He also probably hasn't changed jobs because he knows he's bad at interviews, which is incredibly sad.
No, that optimizing and interviewing for performance under pressure is not needed for most software engineers, while it makes sense for fighter pilots. It's is definitely more stressful.
I'll repeat that the cure for test anxiety is preparation, preparation, preparation. Avoiding it, like your engineer employee, won't be helpful. Keep going to interviews, and the performance anxiety will also dissipate.
The first few times I did public speaking, I'd freeze up and squeak. I speak regularly now, and it's not a problem anymore.
(Again, I attended Caltech. Most of us were nerds, and many Aspergers. I have worked with many people "on the spectrum" and am not at all ignorant of their differences.)
When I worked as a firefighter/paramedic, one of the axioms was that you don't train until you get it right, you train until you don't get it wrong. That, at 3am, sleep-deprived, it's so ingrained in you what to do, you can do it automatically, leaving your mental capacity for the variables of the situation, not the bare minimum of "what do I do next?"
I'm not so sure about that. I'm suspicious of the existence of skilled programmers who cannot handle writing small programs, and vice versa.