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Comment by Philip-J-Fry | Hacker News Reader

It's not an "either/or" choice...

These companies treat it as though if you can't recite a leetcode answer line for line then you're no good.

A software developer skillset is a lot more varied than reciting 5 leetcode answers for algorithms you won't ever use in production code 99% of the time. And that 1% of the time you do? You're just going to Google the algorithm again anyway.

It's an almost pointless interview exercise.

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The interview is not just about leet code. There's also a behavioral loop and a system design loop, and both of those are extremely important as well. In fact most candidates vastly underestimate their importance.

In my experience the leetcode questions were quite easy from an algorithm standpoint: string operations and traversals and things like that. You are judged not just on correctness but also your communication, requirements gathering, ability to catch edge cases and bugs, and general code quality. In other words, things that are absolutely relevant to the actual job.

Partially agree. But developers have to often create custom algorithms that are very specific to their business requirements, and these algorithms cannot be simply googled. I agree they would never write a "sort" algorithm, I suppose interviewers use these generic algorithms, rather than take the additional time needed to explain a real world, custom set of requirements.

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