It's been interesting to watch the sort of "transformation" the industry goes through, even just since I started college back in 2011.
For 5-7 years "Cracking the Coding Interview" was all the rage, practically everyone said to review it, do the practice problems, etc. In the past 3-4 years it's become "make sure you practice your Leetcode an hour a day! Even some hards!", and then from what I've seen while interviewing and practicing the past 2 months, there are websites dedicated to providing study plans, additional review, recommended problems to practice to review specific patterns, etc. Youtube channels, even.
Those last few are also pretty heavily monetized. Leetcode has some limits in place to nudge people to pay for Premium plans. Some websites require a membership. Youtube videos and blogs usually have a plethora of ads.
Of course you don't _need_ to pay anything, but it tends to help more people.
We are in an era where people pirate leetcode practice questions to cheat interviews that companies designed in a way that requires you to cheat. If you show up without preparing the company looks down at you for not cheating.
Then they hire these people and need to stack rank and fire the bottom because their process makes so many mistakes.
A better interview process would involve lottery balls.
Most recently, I've even had interviewers ask me questions straight from Leetcode, who are unable to code the solution themselves.
For instance, for one problem I was given in this way, I had one small logic implementation bug, about one line off that was ruining the output of the algorithm.
My interviewer went, "here, I'll just copy it from them." and pasted, presumably, a solution from Leetcode/wherever they got the problem from.
At the very least if you're going to ask a LC problem (or any problem, really) you should be able solve it yourself; this way if the candidate is mostly on the right track except for a bug here or there it gives you a real world chance to debug it with them and further evaluate their communication and collaboration skills.
Of course, so far in my recent set of interviews it never works that way.
Good luck on convincing people about that. When there are more qualified people than slots, the tried, tested and fair method of selection is a lottery. It has its own set of cons though (imagine repeatedly getting shafted in the lottery, which a very small minority is going to face. What are you going to do, throw a statistics book in their face?).
More than that, it is the illusion of merit. A lottery is an admission that the level of talent required to be productive at these big companies is vastly overstated and that the algorithmic puzzles are just eyewash. That is way too much truth.
OTOH, Passing these interviews gives you that chip on your shoulder that you passed a high hiring bar. Of course, I'm sure you know all the memorizing it took, and how you got lucky that a question you revised was asked at the interview and you feigned ignorance. It will take a critical mass of people who are willing to call out this bullshit and maybe a few really egregious cases that go viral before people start to push-back on this.
Ooh, back in 2004 when i was out of Uni, the 'in vogue' interview questions were more asinine: like "how do you count how many coins are in a mall" or "why are manhole round" , or "why do frogs croak " or "find the odd heavy weight using a scale and 3 measurements "
The Leetcode interviews are a freaking step forward from that. Although they are optimizing for new graduates who have all the time to lose/spend to play with algorithms and "competitive programming"
Are you a middle age gal/guy with a family? Its easy to filter you out because you cannot put 3 hours daily to practice your l33t sk1llz
For 5-7 years "Cracking the Coding Interview" was all the rage, practically everyone said to review it, do the practice problems, etc. In the past 3-4 years it's become "make sure you practice your Leetcode an hour a day! Even some hards!", and then from what I've seen while interviewing and practicing the past 2 months, there are websites dedicated to providing study plans, additional review, recommended problems to practice to review specific patterns, etc. Youtube channels, even.
Those last few are also pretty heavily monetized. Leetcode has some limits in place to nudge people to pay for Premium plans. Some websites require a membership. Youtube videos and blogs usually have a plethora of ads.
Of course you don't _need_ to pay anything, but it tends to help more people.