It was an ok question until around 2015 when i started noticing junior-ish candidates blurted out “trie” immediately and proceeded to write very crappy code for

It was an ok question until around 2015 when i started noticing junior-ish candidates blurted out “trie” immediately and proceeded to write very crappy code for it. In short, it got gamed by the lc types into oblivion. I changed my strategy then to ask very simple algo problem (i would explain the algorithm) with ~20 lines of code solution then aggressively rejected candidates who weren’t fluent in their choice of language. Pros were it was immediately obvious in first two minutes if they coded day to day or just copypastad SO, cons were that it probably was biased against the nervous type. Not my fault though the latter group got shafted by the leetcoders