Ask HN: Will your company be doing "LeetCode" interviews a year from now?

I work in big tech. I'm a SWE manager, but I have a half a mind to return to being an IC at some point. I am using LLMs at work (mostly for reporting stuff etc), and for coding personal side projects, and generally trying to keep up with all this agentic stuff.

I was never good at leetcode, I snuck my way into SWE and SWE management by way of sysadmin/SRE.

I'm considering interviewing at some point in the future, possibly at companies like Google and Meta. Even for Engineering Manager roles, these companies have coding rounds, so I've been "grinding leetcode" slowly.

There is a notion floating around that DSA interview questions are quickly becoming obsolete, since you can just ask an LLM for an optimal solution now.

Putting aside whether it's good for the brain and for being a good programmer to have these skills sharpened, do you think leetcode style interviews are going the way of the dinosaur, or will they stay or even have a resurgence?

3 points | by locusofself 1 day ago

4 comments

ahmadyan 1 day ago
Little did you know, LC-style question is never about grinding LC. Algorithmic puzzles are one of the few legal ways of measuring candidate's IQ without directly asking. Companies are looking for a way to hire smart people, so they rely on LC as a signal. It can be replaced with any similar signal as well (ranging from how many cats can you ship to ISS to solve blackhole physics.)
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- tptacek 1 day ago
  This is one of the most persistent myths in all of hiring. It is not unlawful to test IQ for white collar job candidates. Companies don't use IQ tests because they're not particularly effective, not because they'd get in trouble (reputation aside) for doing so. I don't believe anybody who (a) says stuff like this about Leetcode and (b) works professionally in this industry actually believes they could productively hire off an IQ test.
- bediger4000 1 day ago
  I might buy that, except for how cheesy the actual questions are.
  If you subscribed to the old "Daily Coding Problem" email list, you'd know. Those guys collected actual questions asked in interviews ca 2010-2015, and sent them back out. About half were so poorly worded that interviewers couldn't possibly get anything out of them. Some of the questions required zero algorithmic thinking, or there was only one possible solution. Also, getting a flash of physical insight to solve a problem rarely happens when you're in a high-stress situation.
skynotblue 1 day ago
I'm sure there's a set of problems that LLMs solve in a non-optimal way unless prompted with the specific solution.
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- locusofself 1 day ago
  that's probably true, but if they are anywhere in the realm of leetcode, there are so many example in the training set that they can regurgitate, debug and explain them perfectly. I assembled an entire book of leetcode solutions, explanations, common pitballs etc using claude and send it to my kindle, and so far, it's bang on.
zuzululu 1 day ago
perhaps for companies that are low balling compensation will not budge on leetcode and only those that see real uplifts from AI use will move away from it, testing more for holistic and experience based tests.
i could be misreading it
rvz 1 day ago
> There is a notion floating around that DSA interview questions are quickly becoming obsolete, since you can just ask an LLM for an optimal solution now.
They are obsolete for remote jobs which if the interview is done fully remotely, it can then be gamed/cheated easily.
There will still be Leetcode interviews. But this time, they are in-person and on site. So:
> do you think leetcode style interviews are going the way of the dinosaur, or will they stay or even have a resurgence?
They will stay and be even more important. Companies still ask them but in person.
Companies like Anthropic do not allow you to use LLMs in their interviews. Expect many companies to do the same.