[kamaal]

>>I found none of them cared whether I am thinking on my feet for a solution or not.

There are section of people among programmers who give away tens of hours of time per week on sites of the likes you mentioned, these people have no other hobbies, hardly do any other productive or creative work, have no real social circle and generally spend all the time of their life in 'karma hunger' kind of a pursuit for points in solving some thousand people like themselves already solved.

Now they have to justify all mega massive wastage of time by at least making it look some kind of an intellectually superior activity which other people are incapable of. They might as well fail a few people in the interviews to get some consolation for that kind of wastage of time.

Everytime I see people spending scores of time on these leetcode kind of sites, I'm reminded of exams in India, where students just sit down and mind numbingly practice several years of question papers in hopes of finding similar questions or sometimes the same questions with minor modifications in exams. Finally you get students who barely know anything at all but pass the exams with high marks.

[geoelectric]

I've heard a school of thought that being good at those games is actually a yellow flag because you get conditioned to code fast, not well.

That said, I love those games, so screw that. I just don't confuse them for being a gauge of someone's professional value. They probably correlate some with intelligence, but that's only one piece of the puzzle and probably not the most important piece for the grand majority of hires. Communication, work ethic, and creativity are probably more what I'd look for there.

My guess is a team made up mostly of "just above average" people would probably coordinate and communicate better than a team of "genius programmers" anyway. So there's a bar, but from there it's not as simple as smarter is better.

[mavelikara]

I wish I could upvote this more than once!