I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. Speaking as someone w/ experience on the interviewer side, there are two types of interviewers: the smug ones that ev

I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. Speaking as someone w/ experience on the interviewer side, there are two types of interviewers: the smug ones that evaluate on whether the presented solution matches the one on the answer sheet and the experienced ones that evaluate on signals that correlate to job relevance. I aim to always have interviewees solve the question, even if it means I'm dictating parts to get them unblocked. Because the things I'm looking for are things like fluency w/ the tools, communication, basic understanding of how to apply techniques to a problem, etc, rather than whether they can capitulate on some very specific eureka moment. On the interviewee side, I think many candidates fall into the same mental trap as the smug interviewers; they think of it as a school test where you have to match the answer sheet. In reality it's more about selling yourself to the interviewer in between the lines. I don't really buy the busy family argument; my wife finds time to practice leetcode despite having a full-time job and two kids in the house for a good half of the day. In my experience, people that work more hours per week than the local standard on software roles either have trouble setting expectations w/ stakeholders (and this ability is evaluated in unicorn interview loops for senior level and above) or they just volunteer to overwork when it isn't really necessary. I've seen high-paced environments where the family folks did a consistent 9-to-5 no problem. Extenuating circumstances like family cancer are indeed a valid concern, but at the same time, a minority of cases. I've seen plenty of bitterness along the lines of "some ethnicities/age groups/etc just work too hard" or whatever, but at the end of the day, if we're talking about roles paying north of 200-300k/yr, the dynamics of the incentives will pretty much guarantee that one needs to put above average amount of effort into getting one of those jobs. The thing is there are companies out there like Duolingo or Zapier that are willing to hire from non-hub locations and pay 6 digit salaries, and they may not even ask leetcode questions per se, but their hiring bars are very high nonetheless.