Leetcode is good for some things, but in my experience is it not a good factor to filter Software Engineers (it is a good metric to filter candidates to form a team for the IOI or similar).
This is a response I wrote elsewhere:
I've been growing Engineering teams for the last 10 years as hiring managers in different startups. At some point in our startup we had those kind of HackerRank questions as filters.
The thing we realized is that those sort of interviews optimize to hire a specific type of very Jr Engineers who have recently graduated or are graduating from CS. That is because those are the people that have the time to churn these types of "puzzle" problems. Particularly, there are 3 types of recent graduates from CS or related fields: The ones that don't know crap, the ones that focus on these sort of problems, and the ones that are "generalists" because they dove into all sort of subjects during their degree.
I found out that the Jr people that excel at those sort of problems have a huge learning curve to climb to be productive in "production", real life environment. On the contrary, the "generalists" work better.
We stopped doing those sort of algorithm puzzles interviews after that realization, and we started getting really good Engineers with great real-life experience.
This is a response I wrote elsewhere:
I've been growing Engineering teams for the last 10 years as hiring managers in different startups. At some point in our startup we had those kind of HackerRank questions as filters.
The thing we realized is that those sort of interviews optimize to hire a specific type of very Jr Engineers who have recently graduated or are graduating from CS. That is because those are the people that have the time to churn these types of "puzzle" problems. Particularly, there are 3 types of recent graduates from CS or related fields: The ones that don't know crap, the ones that focus on these sort of problems, and the ones that are "generalists" because they dove into all sort of subjects during their degree.
I found out that the Jr people that excel at those sort of problems have a huge learning curve to climb to be productive in "production", real life environment. On the contrary, the "generalists" work better.
We stopped doing those sort of algorithm puzzles interviews after that realization, and we started getting really good Engineers with great real-life experience.