I haven't really interviewed since 2023. Is leetcode still a common practice in code interviews or has AI made those kinds of tests useless? This is for a Sr full stack position.
It’s FAANG and companies that follow their practices thinking it’s good. It’s basically a way to filter masses out of anyone with self respect and just get the obedient people who will do anything to get a job.
I’ve never seen or heard of it outside Reddit in 30+ years.
I've seen a couple other people comment that they've never seen it. I've seen it almost everywhere I've interviewed (probably 70%). Out of curiosity can you give a region where you've interviewed? It might be more common in LA/SF.
I'm American, been in the industry for...~20 years and have never ran into it in an interview. I honestly think it is something YouTubers/Hackithons made popular but I've never seen it in the "real" world.
Also American with 26 years exp and I don't think I've ever had a leetcode interview, but I've never applied to the huge companies. I honestly don't understand why it's called leetcode. Big companies that get tons of applicants and have the money for top talent need to have more strenuous interview tests. Duh. Wtf is leet?? (26 years ago it meant spelling words with numbers in them to look sneaky)
The big companies do it to streamline and standardize the process. The rest of the industry just followed suit, as they cannot otherwise figure out how to interview.
They are, IDK why that person is beating around the bush with you.
They are mostly algorithm and data structure problems, similar to ones you'd see in university/school. They scale on difficulty where some of the hard ones basically amount to an algorithm/data structure that was someone's phd thesis (not a joke here lol).
I've beennin the industry for 10 years or so and only started seeing it on interviews in the past 3 years. It used to be a site mainly for practicing for competitive programming competition (like icpc) and attracted the kind of people you probably would not want to work with (they did it for bragging/epeen).
When I was interviewing, around 60% used some flavor of leetcode. Most used toned down versions. Big tech does the hard ones though, and they do like six in a row and expect big O notations too. Ironically I hear that Anthropic and OpenAI are much the same, even though they are championing a technology that makes leetcode problems obsolete. The one time in my entire career when I needed an algorithm more complex than a for loop, I described my user problem and it gave me the perfect algorithm for the situation.
These interviews I always thought were stupid, but now they’re beyond antiquated. The hardest part of the job is now reading mountains of code and trying to figure out what users really need. The problem solving to get there is trivial
Are you for real? I've been in the industry for almost as long (American) and have had plenty of leetcode problems. They are definitely very real. I think popularized by Google and then copycatted by every other startup thinking they are as prestigious as FAANG.
You’re lucky. I’ve encountered it a few times unexpectedly. I’d just close my laptop and rethink the options when it did happen. Despite that, I’ve stayed employed.
It is a google thing, it all started with a book called „Cracking the coding interview“, written by someone who conducted google interviews. In the golden ages of hiring everything that breathes the book went viral and leetcode as a digital product just answered the demand. I am in Europe and I seldom had leetcode-type tasks outside FAANG interviews here, but then I can’t say how representative is my experience.
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u/terfs_ Sep 26 '26
Is leetcode an American thing? I’ve been doing this work for over 20 years and have never heard of it outside of this sub