CSCareerQuestions

LC blows. I've been on the side of interviewing and hiring engineers, and the only thing LC is good for is filtering down when you have way too many decent candidates to reasonably interview, like on the order of hundreds for every position. It's like how ivy league college admissions are very arbitrarily selective - getting in is way harder than actually doing the work once you're there. They just need a way to toss out most applications without too much risk of dropping the most promising ones because they don't have the time to critically assess everyone.

Whether someone can remember the algorithm for depth first search they learned 10 years ago but never needed to use is totally useless. System design knowledge is much more relevant, but not as easy to auto-grade a candidate on. But more than either of those is someone's ability to...you know, actually do the daily work and take responsibility for the systems they work on. I actually hope the AI interviewer pre-screenings can take the place of unhelpful algo centric automated assessments.

Like: What does the candidate think about testing? How do they plan a large project? Can they form opinions and drive the outcome of a technical discussion towards a robust solution? Are they capable of organizing complexity into manageable and composable units? Can they quickly debug a problem to identify the root cause? Can they write code to do something practical and similar to the actual work my team does on a regular basis?

Anyway, I'm rambling. If I were in your shoes, I'd look into a trade certification program. Go out and repair wind turbines or something. Sitting in a chair all day looking at screens leaves people depressed.