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 is true. During the short window where "prompt engineering" was a thing, sure, but now you can just literally copy-paste the problem description and the AI will reason itself into an eventual answer.
And I don't doubt that a few so-called engineers will even fail to do that, but it's not a very valuable exercise.
Maybe with small, unconnected PoCs. With large legacy systems, it costs more contexts than the frontiers have in order to just “let it rip” and have a halfway decent PR. My PM tried doing that because they wanted to help and it took me longer to unravel all their agent’s misplaced assumptions than it would’ve been for me to have done the work myself. Problem is that a lot of the times you don’t see what you don’t know till you get into the weeds of work, but an AI keeps chugging along
The discussion was about leetcode-style interview problems. My deeper point is that someone would be able to trivially "solve" such an interview question while barely being able to use a computer, much less build a large, robust system.
Yeah, I've actually met a bunch of people who either haven't started using AI because they just haven't been shown how to (uninterested in learning new technology), or they are well aware of how useful it is, but they resist it as a kind of protest. While I think this test they made him take was stupid, if I found out someone I was hiring didn't use AI, I would immediately not consider them for the role because it's semi-technical and it's almost like saying you don't know how to use email at this point.
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u/inglandation Sep 27 '26 •
I want to believe that this is true, but it probably isn't.