This is my personal experience and opinion of being on their end of companies that use leetcode and that don't. From the companies perspective, leetcode won't

This is my personal experience and opinion of being on their end of companies that use leetcode and that don't. From the companies perspective, leetcode won't help you determine if someone is good at their job coding wise, however it is an indicator of basic talent. If you are the type of person to sit down and grind out stuff for the interview, or you have an innate understanding of algorithms to where you don't really even have to study for leetcode, you show that you have the capability to take on new projects and understand the context, and/or the willingness to sit down and figure stuff out. When I worked for Amazon versus a smaller company that didn't use leetcode style questions, the rate of new hires who couldn't do work without handholding was higher in the smaller company. From the candidate perspective, I personally think that as you get older and more experience, you should be able to program with people (i.e manager) versus programming with a keyboard - if you are just as good at that, its a much easier job IMO. I move to a technical manager role, and the last to jobs I have had overarching system architecture problems in interviews rather than coding challenges. If however, you do want to stick with coding and development, its not unreasonable to expect that you should be intimately familiar with basic algorithms for leetcode. Grinding out and memorizing solutions is fine for junior devs, but as you get older, you should realize that every solution is basically pointer manipulation in some form and way, and not have a hard time in the interviews. Most leetcode interviews don't even expect you to know how to do it off the bat, most of the time if you demonstrate good reasoning skills, the interviewer will course correct and provide small hints and you will still get a fairly high score if you can solve the problem.