[foamflower]

I think we're kindred spirits in a way. I don't find programming terribly vexing, either (I started when I was 12), but trying to teach others has given me more appreciation for how difficult it is to grok something so rigidly logical.

That said, I have no patience for the "smartest boy" syndrome or the, as you say, "LeetCode-like problems" given in interviews.

I suspect that these interviews do "work" in the sense that they successfully filter those who know what they're doing (albeit rejecting numerous ones who do as well), but they run the risk of encouraging elitism, rockstars and "smartest boy" cultures. (I also think programmers are uniquely bad a hiring because when we can't reduce a problem to something solvable by an algorithm, we tend to try to find the cheapest heuristic.)

[mncolinlee]

When I taught AP CS, I got around that rigidly logical issue by performing a very simple exercise on the first day of class to build an appreciation for algorithms.

The students were asked to write out instructions to build a paper airplane. One by one, I would follow their directions as loosely as possible and build lopsided airplanes. The lesson did a reasonably good job of explaining how computers handled algorithms and code.