Even amongst the "top tier" companies, there are alternatives. Stripe essentially does pair programming on things you might actually do in your day job, using

Even amongst the "top tier" companies, there are alternatives. Stripe essentially does pair programming on things you might actually do in your day job, using your own dev environment/etc. That said, I'm partial to good leetcode questions. Some of them are worded terribly, some of them are essentially trivia, some of them are overly esoteric and not applicable to most roles. Some of them are great but have "optimal" solutions which take an absurd amount of research and effort to produce, like quickselect. These questions are bad and should not be asked. Others I find fantastic questions. "Scheduling meetings", anything that requires you to walk a tree or do a binary search/BFS/DFS, and tasks that require you to combine two data structures like the "Hashmap with O(1) get random" question really helped me get better t my job. There's others I'm lukewarm on, like many topological traversal, shortest/longest path, and knapsack/space filling questions. I personally love them and have gotten good at them, but I also don't expect joe schmo to remember how to implement the relevant algorithms off the top of their head. I'd consider this question cohort good for "open book" interviewing at "less prestigious" companies. I'm totally fine with Google/Meta/Amazon asking these closed-book for normal roles.