I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

it sucks, but honestly having a very clear metric for success is significantly better than the wishy-washy interviews that predated this. i'd much rather grind and be prepared to just regurgitate some algo/code and explain it than deal with the color of the sky being wrong, interviewer woke up on wrong side of bed, i was coerced into doing a "project" that equated to just unpaid work, etc.

whether or not you succeed as an engineer generally falls down to whether or not you know how to code (pretty much anyone is good enough at this for most jobs), can you communicate effectively (covered during the behavioral portions of interviews), and do you work hard.

honestly i think it sucks, but in comparison we're pretty lucky. i think a lot of people in this world would be happy to grind a few hours a day for a couple of months to get paid 250k+ base

Libre Office

I lead tech interviews for E5/6 level engs where I work.

Everyone knows how pointless it is. But it’s become more like paying the tax.

For the record, I typically give away the a-ha moment early on and see how the candidate is able to take the suggestion and work through a problem with me.

I see these posts a lot, and I sort of disagree with where they are coming from so I'll play devils advocate. Leetcode is used to select for one of (or both of these) 2 things for the average IC hire:

1. Do you work hard (i.e a person who studies many problems, memorizes solutions, and regurgitates then)

2. Are you smart (i.e a person who doesn't do any leetcode but knows the fundamentals and can sythesize past knowledge well enough to answer a new question)

Now in a vaccuum, my takeaway from someone who doesn't pass a leetcode question is that they are more likely to not be either of those (given no other information about them). In my opinion, solving at least one leetcode easy - medium question (maybe with some direction from the interviewer) should be the standard for any role where you need to code.

And realistically, companies index less on leetcode skill as you become more senior or apply to more niche roles. And plenty of companies out there have bug squash rounds, system design, behaviorals, take homes, trivia, background specific questions, etc. Leetcode is usually not the be all end all for hires above entry level. Leetcode is not meant to magically select for the best engineers. Its simply another signal for the hiring committee to use.

The last few interviews I've run, I've shown the candidate sample code and asked them to review it. We have samples that have at least one bug / problem per line. Then some modeling task (whiteboard). We have some simple exercises (fizzbuzz style) to figure out if juniors actually can junior and as a springboard into discussing topics like runtime complexity, memory layout and stuff. This is all highly interactive, depending on how well the candidate does. The idea is to figure out if the candidate somehow faked themselves through screening as well as to somehow get a feeling for cultural fit...