>Leetcode needs to die and a means to an end in the age of AI.
This is just, like, your opinion. Your future employer may think otherwise, and look for people with algorithmic skills. "But leetcode is actually evil" is just your rationalisation of your cheating.
Leetcode interviews only became popular because FAANG needed a somewhat objective way to weed out large quantities of applicants in an initial round. In this context, and as part of a broader interview process, it somewhat makes sense.
But then of course, since FAANG did it, everyone else jumped on the leetcode bandwagon and started asking ridiculous DSA-exam-type questions that had nothing to do with their actual work, even if they had the capacity to conduct proper interviews for their candidate volumes.
leetcode is a bastard. I fucking hate it with a passion.
Its almost useless as a way to learn how to be a better coder, as most of the "fastest" answers are unreadable.
But if you are using it as a basis for interviews, you are more likely to bump into someone who has trained on that particular question.
I'm not sure what the answer is, as other said, pair programming is kinda the answer. Maybe debugging something in your code base.
I guess my experience with different, because I never had to grind leetcode. I had some basic algorithmic lesson at my University (and a short adventure with competitive coding) but that's all. I never had a technical interviews where that was a problem - either there was no typical coding question, or a simple sanity check exercise. Instead we discussed some problems and thinks related to the job. I understand my experience is not typical - partially maybe I'm currently in the field of it security - but that still doesn't justify participating in the broken process with tools like this. If a company hiring process is broken just... walk away? Let them burn with leetcode grinders with no real experience that they'll finally hire.
I think because google et al started doing coding tests like this, everyone else does.
> This is just, like, your opinion
No, also mine.
The majority of this industry thinks leetcode is shit. It's some skill for sure, just not such an important skill that it becomes the de facto key test for software engineers.
Who said leetcode was "evil"?
I am an employer and would much rather have in person interviews than leetcode.
It doesn't test for anything that AI can do already if not faster otherwise.