Let’s be clear, even today there still a big demand for the positions of software engineers in the job market.

But the Big-N companies like Facebook/Amazon/Google/Microsoft get too many qualified applicants than they have available positions.

In the U.S. every year, Google gets more than 2 million job applications every year.

Yes, more than 2 million!

And only 1 in 130 Google applicants gets an offer, per Forbes. More and more students in colleges go to get a Bachelor’s degree in CS. This means, to get an offer, candidates will face extremely fierce competition.

From the interviewer’s side, how to pick the right applicants from so many candidates?

Interviewing software engineers is hard, there is not such a unified and optimal way for it. Different companies have different styles.

LeetCode is the best way for this? Of course not, but let’s say it is a concise, simple and direct way. Why?

The question and results are clear

A candidate’s performance for a problem will amost in three types:

(a) Solved the problem alone, with an optimized solution. (b) Solved the problem with some help from the interviewer. (c) Can not solve it, even with tips and help.

There are some other factors such as whether the candidate uses an optimized solution, how the candidate reacts to difficulties, how about the communications.

Anyway, it will be a clear result. If a candidate could solve an easy level question, then try a medium or harder one, this kind of investigation has a good distinction.

This will make fewer differences from different interviewers.

To some extent, LeetCode can test a candidate’s programming ability and basic knowledge of computer science. If someone sucks at data structures and algorithms, he can not solve the question in such as short time(usually 15 minutes).

On the other side, even a candidate passes all the questions asked in an interviewing does not mean he must be a good programmer. Usually, some other categories of questions will be prompted, such as system design, or questions related to specific domain, even some stupid brain teasers.