I'm sort of experiencing a weird paradoxical feeling about this. I was spied on by Google and given the FooBar test, which I passed... and until which time I would have never thought of myself as that type of programmer. I can comprehend design patterns, or even have an intuition, but I don't generally think of them upfront (maybe I do more in recent years, maybe it is a skill which can be developed). What I have always been is curious, and just trying stuff out until it works, which I feel like I've seen spoken of a lot. I'm a hackathon winner. I've collected half of the network engineering encyclopedia, which is not really considered when we think about 'programming' exclusively, yet is ironically compared to 'leetcode' here. I've worked on industrial applications. I've gone back to first principles and maths in this AI summer and I'm having fun. I had a previous professional life in music and I've been excited about algorithmic composition (et al) for decades. I have a love for math. That said, I've never felt like the big brain stats types or many of my colleagues in programming. And for that matter, many of that type (anecdotal) have never done the creative things I have in music, etc. So all in all, maybe there are different types of talents!
While I've met plenty of terrible developers from the best universities and with the best grades and interviewing skills, people that was easily outclassed and outperformed by 3-month bootcampers, I can't lie crappiest one are much worse, people who struggle to implement very basic algorithms such as Fizz-Buzz.
Indeed, Leetcode is just slightly harder (or easier even) fizzbuzz anyway.
If you are given really hard questions in an interview or they ask for dumb invert binary tree like questions. It is most likely that person who interviews you is lazy or does not want to hire you but have no choice but to interview you.
I beleive pair programming interviews are the best. As they can be 1) Time limited so you don't take home and waste your time. 2) Can be a portion of a real world problem.
