You’ve just written the exact reason LeeteCode is widely mocked as an interview technique. They are not representative of most real world software, and engineers that train to solve them give a false impression of their ability to solve most other problems.
I’ve interviewed hundreds of engineers for software and hardware roles. A good coding test is based on self-contained problems that the team actually encountered while developing our product. Boil the problem down to its core, create a realistic setup that reflects the information the team had when they encountered the challenge, and then ask the candidate to think it through. It doesn’t matter if they only write notes or pseudo code, and it doesn’t matter if they reach the wrong conclusion. What it’s testing for is the thought process. The fact the candidate has to ask the interviewer questions as though the interviewer is effectively the IDE, is great! The interviewer experiences the engineer’s thought process first-hand. And the interviewer can nudge the candidate in the correct direction by communicating answers that aren’t just typical IDE error messages.
To validate these kinds of questions in advance, I’d often run them on existing team members that hadn’t already been exposed to the real challenge the problem was based on.
Leetcode's utility is not in showing you can solve real-world problems. It's used as a baseline to estimate how smart you are. Every shop prides itself on hiring smart people, and some only want the best of the best—your MIT and Stanford grads, etc. A smarter engineering workforce can not only solve the problems you have, they're better positioned to spot and avoid problems you haven't anticipated yet. Anyways, IQ testing as a condition of employment can open you up to legal liability, as IQ tests are horribly racist. Leetcode is a way around that.
Without commenting on the racial biases of IQ tests (we probably directionally agree), the idea that IQ tests in employment are legally risky is an Internet myth. The companies that offer employment-screening general cognitive tests have logo crawls of giant companies that use them.
They're not unusual because they're legally risky; they're unusual because they don't work well.
Obviously, but we're comparing apples and oranges here.
- Iraq was never a major oil concern for the US. Perhaps maybe stabilizing global oil prices - but the primary beneficiaries were actually our European and Asian allies.
- We never just "took" the oil for our domestic market (which is what we are basically doing in Venezuela)
- Even policymakers who have publicly admitted that Iraq was a massive intelligence and political failure all agree that regional stability was always the main goal.
Similarly we were in Afghanistan for-freaking-ever which had no clear resource benefit or even clear goal.
I would even go so far as to say that for most of the 20th century, America's foreign policy interventions are more easily attributed to our failed role as "World Police". We were brought into Iran because of the British, we were in Vietnam because of the French. Kuwait because of Saudi Arabia. Korea and Lebanon directly.
So while yes you could paint a broad brush and say all of this indirectly was to expand America's "empire", but as an international alliance where America carries the big stick, the US actually carried out a lot more on behalf of the overall alliance than one would realize.
That alliance that the US is now trying to dissolve.
> - Even policymakers who have publicly admitted that Iraq was a massive intelligence and political failure all agree that regional stability was always the main goal.
And in their spare time they pretend to sell bridges to people? Nobody sane would believe that invading a country promotes regional stability. The idea is absurdist, the point of invading a country is destabilising it and disrupting any power that the locals might have. Forcefully toppling governments and killing large numbers of people has never been a credible path to stability.
The Assad dictatorships in Syria and the Hussein regime in Iraq were proponents of Baathism. The former had occupied Lebanon and invaded Israel while the latter had invaded Iran in 1980 and annexed Kuwait in 1990.
> Nobody sane would believe that invading a country promotes regional stability.
Then you should read about some of the biggest influencers in US foreign policy since WW2. There’s one guy whose entire career was spent essentially trying to convince the president / military brass to bomb enemies into submission: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay
I’m sure you’ve also heard of Henry Kissinger.
Anyway, pretty strong history of US political figures dehumanizing foreign populations, justified by some western moral superiority. Direct through line to the Bush presidency (last of the neoconservatives).
Are you suggesting that LeMay or Kissinger believed that invasions promoted regional stability? On what basis? When Kissenger wanted stability he famously promoted détente with Russia and negotiating with the Chinese.
Kissinger did a lot of evil stuff, but a big part of his thinking was when he wanted an area wrecked he sent in an army, and when he wanted stability he negotiated.
Nah more that there’s plenty of history of influential American policymakers being convinced of a certain strategy’s effectiveness only to be proven wrong by history and in the process completely obliterating peoples and countries.
This is the first time I've seen someone talk about vertical tabs in an editor, but I used to make fun of people using vertical tabs in browsers until I tried it and got used to it, so maybe I should try vertical editor tabs...
https://github.com/adhamsalama/webrtc
I didn't bother adding much styling to the website because I was only interested in the network side of things.
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