I’m disappointed to find tech interviews in 2025 are still asking LeetCode questions. Companies haven’t listened to old advice on competitive hiring like DHH’s Hiring programmers with a take-home test or Matasano Security’s the Hiring Post.
Years from now, we’ll look back at the 2015 developer interview as an anachronism, akin to hiring an orchestra cellist with a personality test and a quiz about music theory rather than a blind audition.
Even new companies with the chance of a fresh, competitive approach are still asking LeetCode questions, probably because the FAANG-equivalent companies of decades ago were asking LeetCode questions. A few FAANGs still are. A 100-employee startup primed me with an outline of their upcoming interview steps with a link to a sample leetcode.com question to expect, boasting, “Our interview process is similar to Meta’s process.”
The most dangerous phrase a [manager] can use is “We’ve always done it that way.”
—Grace Hopper
In the most recent 10 years of my tech career, I didn’t have to interview for jobs: behold, the power of referral! Not interviewing meant no LeetCode questions. The last time I had to answer a LeetCode question, the name LeetCode didn’t exist, although the interview style was decades old.
I actually used to be pretty good at LeetCode questions. In my college computer science degree, senior year, I went through 20 interview rounds with 12 different companies. Only the final company accepted me. I didn’t get better at programming during that time, though that would have been a good use of my time. Rather, in that time, I just got better at interviewing. A lot of that was practicing LeetCode-style questions, via the first edition of Programming Interviews Exposed. Having little professional experience, I accepted there was no other practice for me to gain companies’ trust.
Within a few years in the industry, when it was my turn to play interviewer, I became empathetic to candidates. LeetCode hazing was an inaccurate and unfair way to measure. What was the ritual predicting? What hostility was it engendering? I wanted to shake free of the cult. What if we measured actual developer skill: can the candidate do the job well, rather than can the candidate do LeetCode well? What if a candidate was a great fit for the job, but the specialized simulacrum and pressure cooker of live-coding LeetCode interviews excluded such a candidate? I sought the advice of the posts at the beginning of this article, to end the cycle.
If you suffered in life and want other people to suffer as you did because “you turned out fine,” you did not in fact turn out fine.
—@daniel_swensen
Improving the situation was and is easier said than done. Hiring is hard. My teams iterated for years to 1) structure our interviews—a structured interview is fairer but sadly not the friendliest candidate experience, for the interviewer to read from a script at the candidate—and 2) develop relevant, realistic, self-contained assessment projects. For take-home assessments, we didn’t pay candidates for their time, which was tantamount to free labor and exclusionary in its own regard. We also lost a great candidate who was a prolific OSS contributor to our company’s tech stack. They diplomatically pointed to their public contributions as evidence of their skill and collaboration style, and declined the take-home as something they couldn’t afford. What were all their free labor OSS contributions for, after all? Our team didn’t have the capacity to develop and maintain a “fair” backup measurement for the special case. While our fairer structures and take-home assessment were promising for hiring, we still could’ve done better.1
During the last few years, I wound down my consulting workload and took a career break from tech. Then I wanted to go full-time again in my old full stack web developer role, in a new domain. When I started the tech job hunt 12 months ago, I no longer had the power of a referral. So I braced for interviews.
I program every day. I know I can do the job. If an interviewer talks to me, I can demonstrate I know how to program, I’m emotionally intelligent, and that their team would want to work with someone friendly like me. Right?
Much to my chagrin, I didn’t make it far in the interview process, because almost every company I’ve interviewed with this year still uses LeetCode-style interviews. If a company even gives the heads up of what to expect in an interview, don’t necessary believe, “Our live code assessment uses real-world problems.” In 90% of my interviews this year, the technical step was still LeetCode in a trenchcoat.
I was rusty at these live coding interviews, because in my 14 year career, LeetCode and what it teaches never came up on the job. I didn’t reach for binary trees, stacks, queues, or linked lists. Software development is not typically done in a eye-movement surveilled, time-constrained screen-share with 1-2 others silently breathing down your neck, letting you squirm. Maybe the interviewers offer a modicum of hints that make sense to them, as they’ve seen the exact problem several times. Then there’s no time left for me to ask them questions about the job. The interview for mutual fit turns out not to be a 2-way street. It’s dehumanizing for the experienced dev.
When I’m rejected after an interview, in my spirit of continual improvement, I ask for feedback why. 90% of companies responded cagily with a non-answer or that it was not their policy to share feedback, to cover their ass. So I’m not fully certain all the reasons I was rejected over the last 12 months. I might have a worse personality than I think. Maybe a member of the hiring panel was underslept and cranky. All I know is, the interview process ending correlated after I failed to finish a LeetCode step of the interview, i.e. not finishing the coding puzzle prompt within 45 minutes.
Roy Lee, developer of a tool to cheat on these sort of interviews, summarized what I was supposed to do.
You’re given 45 minutes and the task here is to have seen the problem before … and be able to regurgitate the memorized solution, without acting like you have seen the problem before.
Some candidates spend months grinding leetcode.com to reach the top 1%, so they may be lucky enough to have already seen the 1 interview puzzle close to the 1,000s they could be given. Other candidates use cheating software like Lee’s. Meanwhile, experienced developers who could do the actual job well but haven’t memorized the puzzles struggle to complete them under pressure.
The unqualified candidate aces the test. The qualified candidate fails to finish in time, though they can explain what they would do next, given more time. For your overloaded hiring pipeline, which candidate would you advance? The test ace or the struggling explainer?
Lee answered whether he had ethical concerns about his product.
LeetCode interviews are about as correlated [to the job] as, “How many jumping jacks can you do?” … If you were just told to do as many jumping jacks as you could and the winner gets a position, I wouldn’t really care if someone was cheating their way through jumping jacks.
Ethics aside, AI-assisted coding tools are great at solving LeetCode problems. They have memorized 1,000s of such puzzles. If something is easily solvable by computers, maybe that’s another hint it’s not a great test of a software developer? While I haven’t subscribed to Lee’s product, I know I like using AI-assisted coding in my normal job. It would be realistic to have normal tools available in an assessment.
While the debate of allowed tools in an assessment rages on, to skip the debate next time I’m on the job hunt, I hope to cross-reference my applications with the Hiring Without Whiteboards list. Companies on the list don’t make qualified devs jump through hoops with puzzles like LeetCode. The only reason I didn’t use the list this time? The 2025 tech hiring market is very difficult.2 I felt beggars couldn’t be choosers.
I hope more companies think harder who they’re looking for. They’re missing out on qualified devs by following what’s trendy. They’re dehumanzing candidates. There are better ways to interview and measure. I hope to see more companies one day make the Hiring Without Whiteboards list.
Footnotes
Footnotes
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Read more about the ethics and meritocracy myth in Why GitHub is not your CV. ↩
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The confluence of difficulties in the tech hiring market in 2015 vs. 2025: the magic-promising whisper of “AI” in leadership’s ears, venture capital interest rates, and overhiring from the early COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in big tech layoffs and an overflowing candidate pool. In 12 months, I applied to 200+ companies. Less than 10% gave a human response. 50% sent an automated rejection from a “no-reply” email address, within 1-3 months. The rest never tell you the result of your application either way. ↩