There are definitely those of us without formal degrees in software engineering, programming, what-have-you, too. But similarly, I can see some of these employers saying "Oh, you have a CS degree from Stanford? That's cool. How do you perform preorder traversal in a given binary tree? Whiteboard is over here."

I am one of those people myself, absolutely cannot do it. But interviewing isn't like that and shouldn't be. It is more like, cooperatively working on a problem with a colleague and then presenting and explaining it to your teammates. That's a pretty valuable skill at work, even necessary, I would say.

The whole "loner dev in his cave" stereotype, most of the time, just materializes in the form of a dude writing code that no one can understand or maintain, with a cherry on top being that dude not being able to effectively explain it to other people either.

What do you mean? That's pretty much what leetcode-style problems are during interviews. You get a problem with some theme, like "here is a list of airplane flights in an array composed of tuples, with the first member being origin, and the second being destination. Write code that would create full-blown routes out of those flight entries."

You ask questions, clarify constraints, come up with a few approaches, discuss with the interviewer pros and cons of each, decide to go with one, implement it while walking the interviewer through your thought process. And then you discuss limitations and edge cases, scalability concerns, how you would test it if it was a problem you were solving at an actual workplace, etc.

Leetcode-style interviewing doesn't typically refer to "we just pulled a random problem from leetcode, go ahead and solve it while I am standing over your shoulder, and we will check how correct the solution is afterwards." In fact, interviewers care way more about the thought process and your approach, as opposed to caring about your solution matching theirs. In fact, there were many cases where people ended up not solving the problem and passed the interview anyway, as well as cases where people solved the problem and ended up not passing. Because the process of arriving at the solution and the reasoning you took to get there matters way more when hiring (even if you didn't get there all the way to the correct solution), as opposed to just getting the correct answer. The fastest way to fail a leetcode-style interview is to sit down and write down the correct solution as fast as possible, without explaining your reasoning process or even anything at all.

Those are valid points, fully agreed. I think the discussion of those topics must be included in an interview process and discussed in-depth too, leetcode-style problems are not sufficient enough on their own.

>Leetcode focused on tricks and memorizing algorithms.

Strong disagree on "memorizing" and only partially agreed on "tricks". Those "tricks" (like knowing that you should use a hashmap when you need a key-value datastructure, or memoizing [aka caching] repeated operations) are very useful in real life problem-solving situations at work. I can tell you for a fact, I don't remember almost any particular problem from leetcode, and I ended up solving certain problems multiple times on leetcode, because I couldn't recognize them at all. However, thanks to leetcode, I obtained a pretty solid intuition on which approach to use in a particular situation, and it helped me out in the workplace immensely (even if I don't directly implement those approaches or remember the specifics 99% of the time).