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It's frustrating in a way. Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I'd say my well graded Master's Thesis on a complex subject from a top university is much more telling about the type of work I'll create than an hour long leetcode interview will.

It seems no matter how many great projects I make, or quality papers I write, that's second best to 10 minute logic puzzles for a growing amount of companies.

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The problem is that many graduate degrees are very research focused and they don't say a lot about the skills many company's may need from software developers. Jobs I've worked that used Leetcode simply wouldn't need you to do the kind of work you did in your thesis. So they shouldn't be requiring your degree in the list of candidate requirements, but they also shouldn't place a lot of value on it if they're not doing that kind of R&D. I've met a few computer science Ph.D's who showed up on day 1 and appeared to have the coding skills of someone who used BASIC for an assignment in their "Technology" class in high school. One wonders if they're even the kind of people who got pushed through a program so their advisor could stop dealing with them. Maybe they are great at researchers, and abstract thought, and maybe they were very well versed in writing code a decade ago. Maybe they're just not good at it. But either way stuff like this isn't made up: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/. Leetcode comes about to deal with that. Not saying it's a great solution, but don't dismiss the problem.

Same here. I literally got a US PhD in math. Means NOTHING. But can I merge two sorted lists? Now we are talking serious money and benefits.

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