Hiring is hard. It takes serious effort to interview someone and (i) get enough confidence in them to make an offer and (ii) make them want to accept the offer.

Hiring is hard. It takes serious effort to interview someone and (i) get enough confidence in them to make an offer and (ii) make them want to accept the offer. LeetCode seems to have become accepted by candidates as a way to do (1), leaving the interviewer more time for (2). At least, that how I assume people think it works. In reality, hiring is just hard, and if you lean too hard on shortcuts like LeetCode, you come across as lazy, and you end up hiring LeetCode assholes who you catch doing LeetCode during work hours "to stay sharp". One of the most useless team members I ever worked with was good at code challenges but terrible at real work because he didn't care. He wasn't invested in working on the actual problems we faced as a company or as a team. When we had an opening for an infrastructure engineer I created a handful of gitlab projects (terraform, puppet, python) and put some effort into building some baseline infrastructure. I allowed the candidate to choose one to work on, and then gave them a real world challenge. Not some tricksy bullshit to catch them out, just a realistic task they might encounter. They were given access to an environment where they could run the code. So at the end, I had a runnable merge request to review. Why? Because, to me, the purpose of a code challenge isn't to find the top 10%, it's to weed out the bullshitters. The rest is about figuring out what makes them tick, whether or not they're a good personality fit etc.