Leetcode is awful

We all know the familiar sitcom grocery store trope involving a pyramid of cans stacked in the middle of an aisle waiting for someone to pick a can from the middle or for a trolley to crash into it. The humor is derived from the audience anticipating the inevitable disaster and waiting for everyone’s reaction.

Imagine now that a job interview with a grocery store involved rating your skills at building can-pyramids and candidates were automatically declined if they did not place in the top 15% when completing online can-pyramids construction tests.

This scenario would lead to several reliable outcomes:

1. Several startups would begin offering can-pyramid testing services for employers to incorporate into their recruitment process and for employees to practice on and rate themselves with.
2. A subculture would form around people’s ability to build can-pyramids.
3. A vocal minority would nurture the idea that can-pyramid building is an inherently useful skill and a reliable measure of self-worth.
4. Regular grocery store employees who successfully navigated the can-pyramid test would quietly wonder why they never build can-pyramids in real life.

There are perhaps some tangential benefits to be found in expecting grocery store job applicants to demonstrate their aptitude for building can-pyramids. It would weed out applicants who couldn’t be bothered taking the test, select those who were familiar with technology, and prove that applicants could follow instructions. Of course, none of those traits have anything to do with building can-pyramids.

Of more concern would be the grocery stores that genuinely believe there is a correlation between the skills required to build can-pyramids and the day-to-day tasks involved in operating a grocery store. Can you imagine what a nightmare it would be to work in a grocery store that was continually building can-pyramids?

This is why I’ve decided that leetcode is better viewed as a way for candidates to screen out employers rather than the other way around, because leetcode is the technology equivalent of can-pyramids.

Great technology companies are those where employees can confidently answer the question “What am I not responsible for?” This is a deceptively simple question, but it quickly surfaces a team’s:

• Understanding of the processes and frameworks used to produce high-quality results.
• Ability to identify the specialist skills required to execute those processes.
• Confidence to hire and nurture specialists to contribute to, and interact within, the processes.

The inability to answer the question “What am I not responsible for?” means DevOps teams have fallen victim to the idea that everyone is responsible for everything. Granted, small teams and startups do benefit from everyone doing everything, but the mentality doesn’t scale and it persists largely due to the fact that managing it requires no understanding of DevOps processes.

Leetcode interviews are a dead giveaway that a company has no idea how their DevOps teams actually work and instead think that the ability to do bitwise logic in your head or invert a B-tree is a good approximation of what DevOps teams do all day. These companies are likely to evolve artisanal DevOps teams which inevitably stagnate under the load of monotonous BAU work required to keep even the most basic processes functioning correctly.

Leetcode was a fun idea that was taken far too seriously and, in the immortal words of Batman, has lived long enough to become the villain.