Flat-out refusal to do any kind of algorithmic interviews is a red flag for scammers and people who thrive on politics instead of building things.
If you like solving puzzles then LC is your jam.
Puzzles aren’t the same as Problems. The point of a puzzle is to solve the puzzle, in which case my brain just simply isn’t interested. The is no wider end goal.
The point of a problem is to solve an issue for a wider context and, untimely improve a system/process/organisation in some way. In which case I’m all in and my brain starts firing on all cylinders.
The are no puzzles in work, everything is a problem. LC is nothing but puzzles.
My point is that there are far better ways to test that than LC. My favourite interviews have been “here’s a real problem, placed in context, how would you solve it?” And “here’s an app with a handful of bugs, please fix it”
Nevermind that the parameters for STL maps are convuluted to begin with if you're not using them everyday.
And completely devoid of how this works in the workplace. Instead, you are quizzed in a closed environment on a question you have no context for before the interview (i.e. no time to research the problem space). You are given a hard time limit to solve a problem perfectly with a proctor who can range from being a helpful teammate to a stone wall who just says "this is wrong" or "this isn't the solution I wanted". And if you pass that it says nothing about your ability to perform what was actually on the job description. Who wins here?
And the kicker is you may not even get a leetcode question in my domain to begin with. So all that trivia study could be wasted and you fail on some deep C++ deep dive or math questions or any other number of tooling questions. every company is different and they all treat these "problem solving" like we're still in high school and can "cheat" the answer.
We can’t tag all of them like that! Many times you build reputation by turning failures into successes