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Same happens to students if they start to memorize old training exams systematically. They exploit that professors and their assistants will recycle/adapt a decent amount of old questions. Doing this is cheap in terms of effort compared trying to understanding everything.
Of course people that succeed in LC tests will defend it. Gatekeeping is a natural response.
That's reason why we stopped using it and spent much effort in eliminating any possible preparability. You get highly qualified pattern matching monkeys if you offer them the stuff they are trained for.
With social skills and salesmanship, you can never have delivered top-class work even after 15 years as a developer.
Quite a few people know how to "play the game". That's pretty easy if your superiors have no idea about software development themselves.
However, I think this comment highlights the fact that swes are not some privileged elite above at least some of the benefits of organized labour.
the leetcode will continue until union perception improves.
So that tells me that a lot of devs really suck at basic programming, I assume they're the ones joking that their job is just copying code from SO. And probably also the ones who complain about having to show that they can write code before being hired to write code.
Personally I think it's great. Easy way to show that I know my shit and separate myself from all my peers who somehow graduated with the same degree as me despite not being able to write a correct fizzbuzz after 3 years. I'll take a live coding interview any time. I know I'm good at this, don't mind proving it.
This isn't necessarily meant as a complaint, but this is yet another way in which leet code may not really fit the job that's being performed; the company is attempting to get as much work done as possible and for whatever reason is not very incentivized to ensure that the work is done to a high standard. In other words, the super complex leet code sorts of techniques will just never in practice be utilized.
Now to your point, whether or not you find yourself in this situation is going to depend on your job and your company.
I'm not sure whether people literally mean leetcode when they say leetcode, but I should probably clarify that I'm not specifically talking about problems from the leetcode website. I did once get a sort of quiz from codingame to complete at home(took like 15 minutes or so), but other than that I think my interviewers have made up their own problems.
One was a class responsible for storing car data, being able to get them by plate number and stuff like that. Recently I did one where I basically implemented a tax calculator, calculating bracket tax and stuff like that. The general format has been a class with method stubs, and a corresponding test class. The assignment is basically make the tests pass.
I think that's a good format. Allows you to write some real logic, sort of similar to what we do in daily work. The tax calculator was a bit math-heavy but still required some logic and some creative use of data structures to store tax brackets without hardcoding everything etc.