My first software dev job was in the 90's writing PHP for a mom and pop ISP that was trying to get into app development. It was originally supposed to be Perl, the job interview was something like: Me: demos CRUD app for keeping track of my record collection, hosted on a free site Owner: You wrote this? Me: Yeah. Owner: This is in Perl? Me: Yeah. So I got hired. The day I got there, he told me they were going to use…
I wish interviews were like this. Show them something you built and you get hired instead of the nonsense of leetcode.
One problem is that the big companies (that, for the most part, pay the big bucks and people care about and other small companies look to) are market movers. If they are known to be doing some alternative to leetcode then leetcode-type websites and study programs will pop right up to optimize for whatever new metric they have. If they start to prioritize things you've built over ability to perform, you can bet your bottom dollar that within a week there will be a million guides on crafting the optimal cookiecutter project to get in the door at Facebook available on the web. And the signal will lose its value. A signal has to be costly to acquire and algorithmic prowess, although made easier through things like leetcode, is costly for everyone to acquire which is why it holds its value.