LC interviews are well past the curve of utility. 10 years ago, FB and others would do a simple fizzbuzz + lc easy/medium demonstrating that you had a good gra

LC interviews are well past the curve of utility. 10 years ago, FB and others would do a simple fizzbuzz + lc easy/medium demonstrating that you had a good grasp of complexity, pointers, recursion, and iteration. I got a job or two by showing that I could DFS a binary search tree, count letter occurrences in a paragraph, or return the top k elements from two sorted lists. Then people learned to practice these simple coding questions, and employers had to up the anty. Now everyone wants an LC expert who can do an LC hard in under thirty minutes with perfect code and no hinting. I wouldn't be surprised if LC has to open a new category of problem difficulty based on current trend lines. At some point you really are hiring for a skill which is only applicable in interviews. Solving an LC hard in under 30 minutes has little bearing on whether a candidate could solve a novel research problem or difficult refactoring task in their day to day work.