Hell No, Leetcode

I’ve been working with code for literal decades now, and I find that I’m still being presented with leetcode style problems in interviews. It’s a frustrating experience honestly… they rely entirely on algorithmic tricks which even the folks who are good at them will tell you they’re worthless and you’ll never really see/do those things in real life.

It’s a little like being asked to name all fifty states with their capitols… I know I could at one point, I remember having to learn and recite them all in seventh grade geography… but like any other knowledge that isn’t useful in my daily life I’m not sure I can recall them all accurately, at least not without taking a bit to think about it. Well, a senior developer who’s been writing code for years without seeing a single leetcode type problem is in a similar boat… they probably remember seeing the algorithmic trick years ago but can’t recall the details without having to tease it out of their memory.

So what’s the expectation then? That people with lives that don’t involve rereading 50+ year old computer science texts find time to study before an interview? What does that even prove for someone at that stage? It literally is not the job. My head is full of information involving building scalable, fault tolerant, and self-healing infrastructure. Or how you architect a system that can handle millions of requests per second with very tight p999 latency. Those are the problems a senior engineer actually handles. Not algorithmic tricks.

You might argue that it’s still useful foundational knowledge, because you never know when it’ll be useful. But, even that isn’t really true anymore. Not with the AI tools we’re increasingly expected to use. I need to solve an algorithmic trick, the AI will spit it out for me in seconds. My job is speccing and reviewing the code far more than writing it. If the interview were to look like how we actually work now, you’re gonna give me a vague problem, I’ll prompt an AI agent to work it, and we’ll review and discuss the output.

For those thinking that my “state capitols” analogy isn’t fair because you didn’t even grow up in the US: Your leetcode interview isn’t fair because I didn’t learn from a classic computer science curriculum. I learned to code by reading it. I remember when open source meant buying a printed book full of code. One of these, full of C64 BASIC games was put into my hands at a young age and I spent hours and hours reading it until I learned how the games worked. I challenged myself to find specific behaviors and change them in my mind. Because I learned that way, I’m exceptionally good at learning an unfamiliar code base and becoming an expert on its behaviors. In other words: exactly who you probably actually want if you’re working with anything other than a totally greenfield code base.

So no, I won’t take the time to memorize the useless tricks one needs to solve a leetcode problem. And shame on you for even asking when it’s so far removed from the actual job.