The painfully outdated practice of software interviews 

THANK YOU for covering how broken ds and algo interviews are. A developers job is not to write code, it is to solve business and customer problems. In interviews I give practical dev problems to see if they can solve the tech problem but then create problems in which they would need to understand the business problem to answer correctly. If they dont gather the business requirements from me they will arrive at the wrong answer. Whats super important to me is there ability to communicate, solve problems and learn. By giving them problems they have never seen in technologies they have never used, we can "solve the problem together". I try do a few of these because sometimes they just mess one up due to nerves or just went down the wrong track for some reason.

I am a fresher, i graduated this year. I joined my company after grinding leetcode (Solved over 400 questions). Its been about 3 months and I have learned that there's so much more than just DSA when it comes to my job (I have not used Binary Trees or Graphs yet). I've to deal with things like Debugging old code, multithreading, security aspects, Database, Caching, APIs, GIT, writing actual good and readable code, and none of this gets tested while giving a DSA oriented interview. Real life problems are so much different than DSA questions asked in an interview.

Recently, I interviewed a few candidates for a junior developer role. The candidates who had solved more LeetCode problems were not able to answer real-time problems, whereas those who didn't showcase LeetCode demonstrated better problem-solving skills and approaches

At last someone said the truth! Totally agree with you. This ridiculous culture of grinding leetcode problems should be stopped. Interviews should be focused more on engineering skills and putting things all together instead of a single function writing.

This needs to be echoed so much. You can't pass a DSA round without having looked at the question earlier, heck most leetcode gurus advise you to 'cheat' and learn the solution if you can't solve it for 30 mins, which is a joke because DSA now essentially boils down to a test of memorization. Thank you Gaurav for always teaching practical content.

As someone who's been a frontend engineer all me life, I can only suggest - and this is if companies actually acknowledge that a different interview track is needed for FEE - you build a platform that has mock designs, along with some pre written code (scaffolding or perhaps design components for re-use), and get the test taker to complete the mock. Have certain pre written unit tests and ask takers to write more for features they add. Deploy the end result to a Netlify server and send the final build for review.

thanks gaurav for bringing this up, you always inspire us towards real engineering, really excited for this kind of hiring process where companies actually ask relevant questions instead of 4-5 DSA interview

Hey gaurav, I work at amazon and I have been part of more than 10 sde interviews (some shadowing, some reverse shadowing and some one on one) and absolutely agree with you, although problem solving is a big part of software Engineering it's not all it is. And there must be better ways than tedious mind numbing one hour interviews on DSA to test someone's problem solving. If I take my example I struggled at my company when I joined as an sde1 because I didn't know a lot of fundamentals of software development (not even knowing what design patterns were lol) and knowing BFS DFS, DP didn't help either XD (because lets be honest very few of use graph DS in our projects). Really excited to see your product and all the best for the launch. Cheers!!

Great initiative Guarav!! really hope to see this as the future of software interviews:)

👏👏👏 Yes, the message all us have been thinking, is finally being shared. Looking forward to trying out the product when it launches later this month.

Thank you for bringing this up. Just FYI, I recently appeared for a data science interview at a startup, and they had copied the Amazon interview process - 2 behavioural interviews, 1 system design interview and 1 coding interview. Then I got the feedback that I had not cleared the system design bar. Another startup had asked me to design scene matching algo for identifying locations from photos, using computer vision. They expected me to provide a solution in 2 days time. The best interview process that I have been a part of included a CCAT aptitude test, with a bar of 36/50, a problem solving take-home challenge related to day-to-day work and a behavioural interview. In the end of the day, we do not need to solve puzzles at work, we do not engage in hypotheticals, and we surely do not need to know the syntax or library by heart - so my best experience was when the employer acknowledged it and allowed me to use all resources at my disposal during the interview. I wish more employers were like this!

Very excited for this product. Will surely sign up for the service

I agree with your statement, in 2023 many interviews for programmer are broken. And also I do find questions about general problems, component level, systems interaction/behavior/interfaces/messaging better suited for my niche which is backend programming

main issue with leetcode vs real world is, in leetcode you exactly know what the problem is, what input is and what is expected, but in job you have to figure out problem yourself, and solve it, debug old code etc

100% agreed, on the leetcode part.... got a full-time job at a startup in BLR and lol i dont even have a leetcode or a codechef profile, the cto at our startup has been building cool shit since 2016 and neither does he do leetcode problems as it does not have any real world connection. even when i got this job, got it purely based on my dev skills, my projects, the things that i have built and my GH contributions. Pure dev skills >>>>>> leetcode

Hey Guarav; first, thanks for your commitment to education! You’ve helped me a ton. On this topic; sorry if I missed you covering this but have you considered fixing broken unit/integration tests? Seems easy to automate and relevant to the job.

i think DSA based technical interview question is still needed for junior or entry level software engineer because of lack of experience on maintaining a huge system or whatever. But for senior role, i agree with you,it is not rellevant anymore

Curious to see if there’s any data around the no. of false positive engineers at a company (i.e engineers who are great at leetcoding but not that good at real world engineering, which ultimately should be what companies care about). I am sure the problem exists, want to know the scope of it.

Eye opening!

I support this initiative.

Digging those orange frames bro

I have experienced interviewing at FAANG and other tech giants. I feel like questions on concurrency and fault tolerant APIs would really help in judging candidates correctly. I think many companies like Tesla are already interviewing in this fashion.

That's a great approach, DSA is not a way to test software engineering skills

1000% agree. You are one of those skilled person who is calling out this problem. I hope MAANG interviewers are watching this video. - I was rejected from a MAANG interview just because. I didn't know the equation of Binary Tree Search. Being an iOS Developer I never need it. Also a backend developer can use optimised database query to get quick result. - Once Infosys interviewer asked how will I scale up my iOS app if userbase is too large. I said server needs to be scaled in case of API calls. He wasn't satisfied with answer as he wanted me to give solution to scale up my Mobile app.

I totally agree with you Gaurav. Your reasons 100% makes sense, engineering should focus on engineering skills rather than just mathematics. People usually do DSA & Algos for couple of months & they are able to clear the interview, and mostly do it just for clearing up the interview rounds which is very much irrelevant for them once they start working in such companies, rather companies should focus purely on practical engineering skills.

Nowdays, some companies started with system design or machine coding round which is welcoming move. I do not like dsa questions which are irrelevant to actual job. Having said that...candidate should be aware of how dp, greedy and other algos work.. Which i think can be covered in automated platform.

I did mind these type of interviews before, but now that I am more experienced, and go as senior software engineer, I don't mind them. Why? They tell me which companies to avoid based on their interview process. When I encounter a company which during the interview just talks to me about a problem and how I would approach it or some concepts and we can share experiences and opinions, I know that this company may be worthwhile. On the other hand, when the interviewer asks irrelevant questions that require me to grind leetcode or remember syntax of some rarely used and obscure feature and judges me based on that, I simply withdraw from the process as it shows me what kind of people my potential colleagues would be.

Hello Gaurav Bhaiya! Would you mind answering my question? Is it natural for someone like me who loves Mathematics and Algorithms/ probem solving to like doing Backend development rather than Frontend. I don't like building UI but am very interested in working with databases, writing APIs. I am a fresher. Can you please share your thoughts on this???

Thats a great idea

I've not seen the video at all and am writing my opinion solely on the basis of the title solely because of one reason, don't want to be biased by your thought process, will watch it after I am done. I've taken a lot of interviews and I followed the broken system thinking that this is how things should be. But today when I try to recall which of the guys I hired have done great, I can frankly say that the guys whom I hired for attitude have done the best. They were good at coding but not exceptional but could adapt to the situation and had the attitude to learn. I believe that as an interviewer it's very necessary to understand what kind of talent you want for your team and most of the interviewers don't understand it at all, for them, it's like a Jira task to be done by hook/crook in most of the cases. Personalization can be done while hiring for a position like this example: I'd prefer to hire a folk whose average is coding but great at thinking like a product engineer in a lean/small startup vs a great coder when it comes to hiring in a company where only I need someone to implement an extremely clear problem statement written by some staff eng. My interview style will be different in both companies. Also, I'll make my interview lenient/strict depending on the budget I've, I won't expect to hire a very bright engineer by giving him/her peenies and even if I manage to do that eng will leave soon and we all can agree on that. I think lately we're too obsessed with hiring people solely based on criteria that don't include business/product thinking. I believe that in the long term, it simply backfires. One thing I'd like to change is to make the interview more practical-oriented, i.e. asking questions that are mostly aligned with the company's vision and attitude. That's how we can get a great fit.

Right now in front of me one of my friend is giving interview for frontend role and he is implementing BST!

I want to buy system design simplified course. what time period will i have access of the course? Also i really appreciate your work.

I used to think of this about since my college days.

I remember in 2011, the online code test platforms didn't have support to common libraries so they used to ask shitty quesitons like linked list, string operations etc. It is quite easy in 2023 to import any of common libraries so tests must be upgraded. Many companies like scaller are taking advantage of such shitty interview questions to sell their courses and fool freshers.

Agreed!!

Then what about people who are doing leetcode and competitive programming since long time? Is their hard work completely going to be useless now? I think design skills must be tested along with dsa rounds from sde-2 level as happening in faang companies.

what you said completely make sense but there needs to be a coding round level should be decreased and it should be more focused on basics

Hi Gaurav. Those who are still in university, how should we prepare ourselves? I dont like cp or dont like the idea of solving hundreds of leetcode problems.

Thanks for this software... And Mere ek request haii if you are comfortable talking in Hindi.. please make one more youtube channel GKCS Hindi😊😊😊

do you think that in the next 5 -10 years dsa will become irrelevant and won't be asked in interviews?

Hear hear!

This is exciting! I have been a hiring manager for two decades, and a programmer for a decade before that. I have never had to write a prime number generator, reversed a string, etc. I will be watching for how to help with this! One suggestion: how about including debugging skills? “Here is a stack trace and the code which threw the exception. How would you fix it?” Now there’s something an SE will do thousands of times in their career!

i like the integration😋

I used to think I would never see these things in my daily job but it’s not entirely true. I have personally written variations of binary search, graph search algorithms, graph databases / data structures, and have had to worry about time complexity. Without these things, I would have had to resort to approaches that make it hard to solve the problems elegantly. There’s a lot of kinds of questions that can be avoided, but it can’t entirely be avoided. If we don’t ask these questions, big tech companies would not necessarily be able to allow engineers to freely switch teams without reinterviews. On the whole, I agree, we shouldn’t need to ask these questions. Most jobs won’t require it. But as you progress, you often see these sort of problems…and it’s helpful to know how to tackle these.

pretty depressing to see because I'v spent 6 months into DSA and now it's useless. and preparing for new style will take even more 6 to 8 months of time. 😭

Been in industry for many years. Always knew this madness around Leet Code is going to fall flat one day. Unless you are building something very low level these algorithms are already implemented for you. Even if you could code them, you shouldn't because you are not going to do a better job than the library most likely and your employer will not appreciate you reinventing the wheel instead of shipping the product fast.

Specially now in thr era of chatgpt, they seem to be even more irrelevant.

hey gourav da. don't tell the truth I'll understand 😂😂... the sponsor was a sarcastic joke right?

A junior developer barely gets a chance to solve a tech stack problem. Whatever Mr gaurav is selling (system design) is also not in the hands of a junior developer…heck..it’s not even in the hands of a staff engineer….so good luck with these kind of web sites

Are coding interviews often irrelevant: yes. Are software engineering and designing web services the same thing: no. What's being called as software engineering here is actually web services design. It won't be relevant in many dev roles, e.g. embedded sw dev, telecom sw dev, kernel dev, device drivers, file system and storage solution dev, compiler writing, dev of tools like version mgmt sw, profilers, static analyzers etc, network protocol dev, office suite dev, AI, comp graphics sw dev, to name a few. Is the initiative good: absolutely. Is it all encompassing: no.

I disagree with that opinion that coding rounds are irrelevant to our jobs. Quite the contrary, I found lots of innovative work that happened or should happen in workplace are fundamentally driven by the engineers’ strong passion on problem solving and coding skills. Such skills are more core and essential to measure during interview than other skills that may appear more “relevant” but less essential or even superficial.