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Eh...interviews were a mix of brainteasers like the manhole question and coding questions. IIRC some of my MSFT interviews back when allowed pseudocode but mostly wanted to fill the role of e.g. FizzBuzz. Then IIRC there was some validation of C or C++ competency.

Leetcode is FizzBuzz on steroids, but IMHO is not on its own likely to be more predictive of success at a company than the old MSFT way.

Being able to reason about possible design decisions and constraints of things you encounter sounds much more related to programming jobs than being able to code a red-black tree from the top of your head.

> Would that mean it was the era of "Why are manhole covers round?"

"how many balloons can you fit under this table"