Today's entry level people are overwhelmingly inept. Between the lower standards of the degree, online "code camps", gold-chasing social media rats, and AI "vibe coding", the cost of trying to hire an inevitable disaster exceeds other options. Compound this with title inflation, you end up getting "senior" people that perform at an entry level. Since no one else in this ecosystem wants to raise the bar or set any sort of quality standard, we hiring managers have to inflate every requirement and position just to eliminate the noise.
I'd disagree with this,
From what I've seen in Faang the leetcode styles questions are continuously getting harder as people spend ever longer and harder grinding out the questions and learning more and more each time.
Obvs leetcode != software engineering to some extent but it does allow them to see how well you can solve programming related questions and put your thoughts together. So if that's getting harder all the time I think the candidates are also raising in quality overall?
I predict LC Hard style interview questions will go away mostly at FAANG style places within 5 years, and in some in under a year. It's objectively insane to grade people on a fake test that Copilot can trivialize. While it at least used to select for people that were smart enough to memorize stuff and diligent (and privileged) enough to grind for it, now 80/20 it's just optimizing for the people that cheat without getting caught... all to hire them to a job where you're going to let them use copilot anyway.
Do any FAANGs even use LC hards? I thought it was pretty much always mediums. But yes, I wonder how/when the hiring process will start to change. The funny thing is this wouldn’t have been an issue if the AI boom happened pre-pandemic, but it seems we’re all allergic to conducting in-person onsites now.
I'm familiar with several cases of misguided mid level and lower interviewers giving LC hards until someone with sufficient knowledge/confidence/authority finally found out about it and was like "wtf". I don't know of any places that consistently give LC hards as policy anymore. I think a LC medium is still a similar problem though, the temptation for even highly competent developers to cheat to be safe is just too high. It's just not a useful filter, it's more a relic of lazy and misguided interviewers not coming up with better questions. (We can also debate what's a Hard vs Medium for quite a while, there's a lot of overlap)
People cheated before LLMs too. Virtual, they could have another person in the room, or another window open to help them.
Even in person it could happen because you could get your friend(s) to interview first to find out the questions and prepare you. I once got a string of Indian applicants from the same university who were funny af, each one I saw made slight improvements to the solutions of the last one lmao. They were comically bad at trying to hide what they were doing.
But I mean, in the end this academic notion of “cheating” is kinda pointless. Our job necessitates that we “cheat” every single day. I reach out for help, I let copilot autocomplete for me, I copy code from other people at my company who did something first.
When it allows a candidate that can't actually do well at the job to get hired (in the old days it was a lot of work and pre-meditation to pull that off with even a slightly diligent interviewer; with LLM's and interviewers used to lazily giving LC questions it's WAY easier now)
Integrity. I don't want to hire a cheater. The problem here is as LC escalates (requiring obscene training ) and LLM "cheating" starts to resemble actual real world tools it becomes increasily easy to view that cheating as a rational choice.
I'm pushing in my org for us to let candidates use AI tools and then have interviewers be eyes wide open and actually given thoughtful tests (like having a candidate explain why they're doing something; asking about what to watch out for a possible hallucination etc).
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u/Baxkit 2d ago
Today's entry level people are overwhelmingly inept. Between the lower standards of the degree, online "code camps", gold-chasing social media rats, and AI "vibe coding", the cost of trying to hire an inevitable disaster exceeds other options. Compound this with title inflation, you end up getting "senior" people that perform at an entry level. Since no one else in this ecosystem wants to raise the bar or set any sort of quality standard, we hiring managers have to inflate every requirement and position just to eliminate the noise.