Leetcode and the “grind fake problems as interview prep” mentality is the absolute worst thing that has happened to the software industry in the 30 years I’ve been in it. If it disappeared suddenly, we’d all be better off.
I agree that we need a better way to evaluate people that meets the purported goals of being fair and eliminating the chance for bias.
I joined a FAANG at 44 and had to do the Leetcode evaluation. TBH, it wasn't so much a grind as a bit of re-learning how to ride a bicycle. I have the "benefit" of being old enough that solving those kinds of low-level problems was work I actually did in my younger days before all of these fancy libraries existed. I spent about 10 hours over the course of a couple weeks just "refreshing" myself on ways to identify the brute force vs. clever solutions to some basic CS problems of array manipulation and graph traversal.
It was pretty low effort, but it was the side show to my decades of experience. For younger folks with only a couple years experience, I can see how it becomes the "everything" because it's the majority of their evaluation.
