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One man's leet code is another man's simple programming question which involves minimal domain knowledge...

I've had candidates describe what I'd loosely call "warm-up" questions as leet code problems. Thing like finding the largest integer in an array or figuring out if a word is a palindrome.

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When people say leet code they usually mean problems that are easy once you know the algorithm, and hard to impossible (in an interview) otherwise.

typical examples would be sorting algorithms or graph search problems, and some companies do indeed ask these; some big tech (the ones everyone studies for) may exclusively ask these. Thats imo largely because CS new grads are their primary pipeline.

I mean to be fair "figure out a word is a palindrome" is literally one of the first questions on leetcode. #9 https://leetcode.com/problemset/

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