[bfung]

Agree that 99% of the leetcode interviews are divorced from everyday coding work.

However, this article goes in the wrong direction in trying to keep the LinkedList premise - how often do programmers see a raw linkedlist anyways?

Directly ask coding questions from your everyday work, and skip the linkedlist stuff as 3rd level detail questions; the signal that the candidate can do the job is much higher then. Ex: here’s an API and it’s json response: write some code to parse it. Add extensions like paging, network failures, etc. Let the candidate google everything, and if your question is good, it can’t be copypasta from StackOverflow.

[b20000]

that sounds like a takehome and should be paid for.

[bfung]

It’s possible to structure the question to fit 30-45min. It’ll be pretty clear what level and experience a person has in doing api’s. If the json response is already laid out, parsing json can be an independent task from the network call. The point of the interview is to see if the person can reasonably code it, it doesn’t have to be production grade.

[b20000]

DOING api’s, what does that mean?

leetcode interviews do not test if a person can reasonably code. they expect people to give a specific optimal solution to a specific question which you can only provide if you have solved the question before, in the way it is expected, within max 2-3 minutes. the process is broken.

the moment you ask a candidate to build something you could use in your codebase you should pay them.