On lower levels leetcode style stuff gives more quantifiable signals per minute/session.
Plus, do you really want to fully explain something like paxos or raft in interview context?
My personal pet peeves are
1. “event sourcing” and derivatives. It really attracts people who love to talk but never built anything large using it
2. Adepts of uncle martin
Plus how do you expect to get good signals from a leetcode whiteboard interview for someone who spends most of their time designing systems and only writes code when it gets to the point where it's faster and less frustrating to pair program vs explaining what needs to get implemented?
To clarify, I don't have a good answer: I still participate in leetcode style interviews (though system design is another component) - but although I sing the song and can't come up with anything better, I don't think it's the best way to go
In my experience things like publications, online code repositories, and facts are more than irrelevant but not much more because people don’t know how to independently evaluate these things. Worse, attempting to evaluate such only exposes the insecurity of people not qualified to be there in the first place.
Far more important are numbers of NPM downloads and GitHub stars. Popularity is an external validation any idiot can understand. But popularity is also something that you can bullshit, so just play it safe treat everyone as a junior developer and leet code them out of consideration.
And intentionally excluding candidates is the whole point of designing an interview process, it's lazy to lift your arms up and declare that they're all biased.
[1] Starting to do math with non-base-10 numbers was already a pass, regardless of the number you reach, you'd normally use a computer for that. But it really isn't too hard to do in your head directly, for anyone who's dealt with binary data.
If you're coming from the position that one is
"understand and assess and write and communicate a deep set of domain-specific knowledge"
and the other is
"on the fly recursive algo regurgitation"
then it will be hard to change your mind about any of this.
---
You could have just as easily called system design interviews regurgitation and coding interviews "communicating deep domain-specific knowledge".
Interesting excerpt from [0]:
> Finally, it seems that even the weak IQ-job performance correlations usually reported in the United States and Europe are not universal. For example, Byington and Felps (2010) found that IQ correlations with job performance are “substantially weaker” in other parts of the world, including China and the Middle East, where performances in school and work are more attributed to motivation and effort than cognitive ability.
[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4557354/ [1]: https://www.academia.edu/download/50754745/The_Interactive_E...
Sorry about the PDF link to [1]. The APA link has a paywall otherwise I'd link there.