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The most amazingly productive engineers I’ve worked with have all been incredible leetcoders.

You’re right though — I might as well be saying they were also incredible bakers or skaters. If those were also high signal identifiers of good devs then we’d be kneading dough while doing ollies in the interview rooms.

What irks our industry is that there are plenty of good developers out there that produce quality day to day plumbing and integration work that suck at leetcode. That’s fine. We should hire them too, but if you are FAANG you don’t need to if you have post grad leetcoders knocking down your door every day of the week to supplement your already burgeoning cadre of sensible staff engineers.

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I have never applied to FAANG for exactly this reason. But I have seen this style of interviews creeping up to dominate over the last decade. At least in the Bay Area. My impression is that European interviews are more sane (no dynamic programming, more take home coding challenges).