[timr]

Also equivalent career experience, including lots of interviewing experience, and I agree completely.

Leetcode problems are almost useless for determining what matters in a professional engineer. But the stuff that really matters (communication skill, clarity, patience, flexibility / lack of dogmatism, taste, constructive criticism, political savvy, prioritization of constraints, willingness to write documentation, reading code and finding bugs, etc.) is not something a new-career engineer a few years out of an undergrad CS program can competently evaluate, because they're probably not very good at these things themselves. And in this industry, that's largely who is doing the interviewing.

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This is true. I'm somewhat disconnected from FAANG and bay area behaviours. Before going wandering most of my career was in Sydney and Melbourne. I think in Australia early career engineers are not doing the interviewing, more tech leads and engineering managers (or whatever we're calling them now, staff and principle?).