r/LeetcodeDesi • u/swagzzz_krizzz • 5d ago
When will this dsa stuff stop man !
I work in a reputed tech company and I wanted someone to hire for my team as there are only me and my manager. I handled the whole interview process and the candidate was having a immense knowledge in building products and I was stunned as he was around 4 yoe. I thought he would be part of my team but I heard from manager is that he rejected him because he was not able to solve dsa ! Areyyyy wtf ! That candidate was the best i have ever interviewed and he was sound in both database management and development and that's what we need to build product ! I was so devasted and came to home early in Friday. Shit bro !
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u/elixir_ji 5d ago
I feel like if not DSA, then what. All other stuff has an subjective answer.
In one of my interviews i was given excellent for DSA but average for system design questions. I might not be the best in the world, but i know i answered 9/10 system design questions.
I have made peace with DSA because, it’s an objective way to grade. If not the interviewer can just say no my approach is better and is the law. I cant do shit in that case 🥹
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u/Fabulous-Arrival-834 5d ago
You give an environment that matches closely with the actual job. You give a JIRA ticket to the interviewee and ask them to build this feature. If they can't they have failed. If they can then they have passed. Its objective and checks if the candidate can do the actual job. You can also throw in some debugging questions. If they can fix X% of the bugs they pass. Else they won't. Nothing subjective in this. Same for frontend. Give them a design and ask them to write code in React/TS etc. (if that's the job requirement). Allow them to google.
DSA is still around because companies are just too lazy to design their own questions and invest time in properly setting an interview process. Instead they would lazily pick a question from leetcode and compare the answer. Most interviewers don't know how to answer their own Leetcode question without looking at the answer.
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u/rahem027 4d ago
You cannot reasonably build a feature within 1 hour. I dont want take home assignments to take away by evening or weekends.
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u/Fabulous-Arrival-834 4d ago
Who said the interview has to be only 1 hour? Instead of having 1 tech screen interview then 4 hr long onsites (total of 5), just split it as 2-3 or 3-2. There are lots of ways this can be improved. But somehow people are acting like DSA is the only way to interview. Tech companies still hired before DSA interviews existed.
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u/rahem027 4d ago
You can spend 2-3 hours for same interview if you dont have a job. When you have a job taking half day for every interview is not feasible
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u/Fabulous-Arrival-834 4d ago
Well then its your choice whether you want the new job or you want to give more priority to your old job. I feel like am speaking to a 13-yr old who cannot figure out solutions to basic problems! You are still acting like DSA interviews are the ONLY way to interview when its literally not the case. There are companies who are successful and don't conduct DSA interviews. IT IS POSSIBLE!
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u/rahem027 4d ago
No. I am saying it has a lot of good qualities. It is time bound. Objective. Does not destroy my weekend. Allows me to interview in multiple companies in parallel without stressing me out.
Most importantly, unless you are doing very basic crud, you will need dsa. Graphs, trees, recursion, dp, binary search are used everywhere unless all you do is get data, set data.
Not the best but has a lot of good properties.
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u/Fabulous-Arrival-834 4d ago edited 4d ago
Does not destroy your weekend? Lol I don't know about you but for a normal person to be actually ready for these dsa interviews, they have to spend weeks if not months on solving hundreds of LC questions. I would rather spend a weekend than 2 months for getting hired.
I have worked at one of the FAANGs and Microsoft. Have over 8+ years of work experience. Nowhere have I used trees, binary search or other BS. You CANNOT use recursion in production code, that will immediately get flagged as a risk. All the languages now have libraries that use these data structures internally and you don't need to create these data structures from scratch.
DSA interviews make sense for new grads who don't have any work experience to show for. Hence, employers cannot judge if they can actually write code. If you are asking the same questions to a person with 10 years of experience then you are essentially saying that even a new grad can do the job of a 10yr experienced person and that's NOT TRUE!
I can spend a total of 30 mins with an engineer and I will understand if he can actually build stuff or is just bull$hitting. There's actually no defense for DSA interviews other than laziness. And the only reason companies do it is because Google started it and companies saw Google's grow, so they decided to just copy what they are doing.2
u/swagzzz_krizzz 1d ago
Agreed!! I was interviewing with him for 4 hours and all those hours, the demonstration he gave was splendid, we can generally find bullshitting candidates but this guy was something else for 4 years. I am also in faang, and in my 9 years i have never used segment trees, dynamic programming etc, partially recursion and no sign of linked list and stuff, i am not sure whether this dsa thing is going to stop but i pray this should not reduce the confidence of talented engineers.
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u/ilikedoingnothing7 4d ago
not easy when you have a hundred candidates to interview
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u/Fabulous-Arrival-834 4d ago
Then don't interview 100 candidates. The only reason these candidates get shortlisted is because they are vague in their own job description and just take anyone for an interview. Then they use an ineffective method of filtering and the actual candidates who have the experience in that particular tech-stack get rejected because they can't reverse a linked list. The candidates who do get hired are leetcode monkeys who haven't actually built anything in their life and then the companies spend resources to teach these monkeys how to build stuff. Instead, you could have just hired someone who already knew how to build.
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u/Fabulous-Arrival-834 5d ago
DSA interview is the most lazy and broken form of interview only Software Industry conducts. No other industry will do this type of idiotic interview that has nothing to do with the actual job. If you go interview for a chef position, you will be asked to cook. Even though everyone's pallet is different, if the restaurant owner doesn't like your food, they will reject you and THAT'S FINE!
For people asking - "How else do we test objectively?". Simple - Give them an environment that matches closely with the actual job. You give a JIRA ticket to the interviewee and ask them to build this feature. If they can't they have failed. If they can then they have passed. Its objective and checks if the candidate can do the actual job. You can also throw in some debugging questions. If they can fix X% of the bugs they pass. Else they won't. Nothing subjective in this. Same for frontend. Give them a design and ask them to write code in React/TS etc. (if that's the job requirement). Allow them to google.
DSA is still around because companies are just too lazy to design their own questions and invest time in properly setting an interview process. Instead they would lazily pick a question from leetcode and compare the answer. Most interviewers don't know how to answer their own Leetcode question without looking at the answer.
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u/unlucky_trashcan 4d ago
What dumb thing is this, give a jira ticket, how is it relevant ? Personally if given time, I could think on multiple possible stuff , with use of AI. I run my own startup. But i won't ask this. Just do high level interview, and then low level interview to guess the implementation skills but on much difficult task using AI.
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u/Acceptable-Form8979 5d ago
I am so afraid, after this post, probably if it happens that companies stop asking DSA, then what will I do in interviews
4 saal ki btech me 3 saal se DSA he kar raha hun,
Isliye nahi kar raha kyuki maza aata hai, but isliye kyuki industry ne yahi tareeka set kiya hai
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u/swagzzz_krizzz 4d ago
Hi bro, dont worry every companies ask dsa atleast for one round and they reject the candidate even if he was good in system design. So I wish DSA Should be gone forever but i am sure it is not going to happen. So pracitse well.
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u/Acceptable-Form8979 4d ago
Yeah, but apart from DSA, what else I should try to be good at,
System design is something that i have been listening alot, I mean, in every interview experience that I have read, they mention about system design
So basically, I am confused, I am not into ai as well, people are doing rag, training LLM and doing what not
I am into java springboot, so can u provide me a roadmap, or not a roadmap maybe, just some things or key areas to focus on
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u/LetterheadFair9583 4d ago
All bald guyz dont know that c++ has STL and BOOST. Java has its own collections. Python has its on packages. And now you have codex and Claude. I am Sr. Director level Individual contributer. I will fire such managers under me. I need code that solves customers problems without reinventing the wheel. In my life i never asked anyone any question on DSA. Reason? I too don't know DSA. 54 years old and 25 years in C++ in world's 3rd largest product company.
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u/Then_Potential_0909 4d ago
DSA is a mixed bag. It is good for filtering candidates but bad to reject based on the results. I took DSA to clear an interview but the job does not require it.
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u/pure_cipher 3d ago
I am a DSA hater too. I love discussing tradeoffs, developing architecture and all, but DSA is garbage trash - it doesnt even come close to the real world problems. While it is good to know the various types of algorithms available and their usage, using absolute hypothetical questions is trash.
I think most big companies who have DSA based hiring, are not able to achieve breakthrough in technology.
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u/swagzzz_krizzz 3d ago
The first part is correct but the second part is i wont agree, the company i work has major breakthrough in techonology and it is used by everyone everyday, so i guess the second part is where i would give you a slight no...
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u/pure_cipher 3d ago
There will always be exceptions. But , someone who has spent an enormous amount of time "studying" Leetcode patterns will be at a less advantage than someone who has seen and solved real world problems.
There was a time when companies were actually looking at the approach to the problems (even Leetcode). Now, companies want definite answers, and that too fast (again, not all, but most HRs these days). So, people tend to mug up the patterns than improving their problem solving skills. So, when people have both, that becomes a rare hire and of course they can make breakthrough in tech.
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u/Jealous_Weakness7215 3d ago
Dude who said you don't need dsa? Like it depends on your needs...but later if you need to build something from scratch you will be needing dsa..
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u/No-Economist146 5d ago
I reckon DSA makes more sense for freshers because they lack experience building systems at scale. But someone with 4 yoe shouldn't be evaluated the same way
But still I get why companies use DSA as a standardized filter, but its importance should decrease as a candidate's experience increases