[olliej]

I’ve gone through multiple interview processes with apple and never dealt with leet code.

Interviews at google seemed 50/50 split leet code (or interviewer showing off being clever) and reasonable questions.

I recall thinking that my MS interview questions seemed perfectly reasonable, but that was too long ago for me to recall specifics.

As a someone who has been the interviewer I think that people really don’t understand what whiteboard interviews are doing, and a number of claimed “leet code” questions are not. Part of it is that if you’re interviewing at Apple or MS knowing basic algorithms and complexity analysis is important because working at those companies you will be the one implementing such things so other developers don’t have to.

A lot of what people are calling leet code on HN, Reddit, etc are what I would consider foundational knowledge, not anything crazy.

[amerkhalid]

I have been practicing leet code on and off for a bit. I understand all data structures and algorithms that these interviews supposed to cover. I can explain and teach these concepts to others.

But leet code questions are still riddles to me. I have also been watching videos of some famous programmers solving leet codes on YouTube and even they get stumbled and take almost an hour to solve some of these questions.

But once I have seen a solution and memorized general approach, I can solve it under 20 minutes. To me, leet code is more about memorization than actual problem solving skills.