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The point of a leetcode style question is to test someones' ability to explain and adapt a tricky problem on the fly. Given most of a software engineer's day to day is about communication and adapting existing solutions to related problems, leetcode problems are a very powerful tool for analyzing candidates.

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>> The point of a leetcode style question is to test someones' ability to explain and adapt a tricky problem on the fly.

This is just nonsense, since the only reason the developer can answer the question is because they crammed it in preparation for the interview. Leetcode questions are not tricky, they're just tricks.

While there is a lot of nuance to interviewing people, I can't say that solving leetcode problems in an interview setting is similar to any problem solving I've done on the job.

The closest might be white-boarding potential solutions in meetings, but there, most of the time, I have a lot of context wrt. the company and situation.

In the past I haven't minded presenting solutions to contrived problems in interviews, but these days I wouldn't. I also wouldn't take a job without significant equity attached, but I'm probably not representative of most devs.

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