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I think debugging interviews (fixing existing code) would give a much stronger signal than the leetcode status quo, and also not really require studying since reading and tracing code is something we do every day.

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Challenging to make the issue non trivial but fixable in an hour long interview

Yeah, making a debugging question takes more effort than a leetcode question, but it is doable. The company I'm at now has an hour long debugging interview on a single problem, with a few "bonus features" in case the candidate fixes the bugs.

If we were bigger, this might not be sustainable due to cheating though, would not be easy to replace the question.

This is what we do in our interviews. We work on something with the candidate and look for reflexes, thought processes, how they reason about things, how they formulate problems and come up with solutions, what they search for on Google, how they read documentation and repositories. We set up a repo on GitLab. We see how they create issues, how they write code, how they commit, etc. That's what they would be doing.

We also pay close attention to our reaction to them getting something we've been doing for a long time wrong or that took us some time to learn. We pay closer attention to our reaction on them stumbling on the solution we chose.

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