[JohnBooty]

A lot of companies still don't use Leetcode, at least in my experience, so I don't think we need to wonder too hard!

Change hasn't been too drastic since I entered the business in the late 1990s.

Salaries used to be less inflated, so hiring interviews were a little more lax, because hiring a $60K/yr developer is much lower stakes than a $150K/yr developer.

You were also competing against fewer candidates. "Back in the day" before WFH they might have had 10 or 20 applicants instead of 200 or 2000. So there was less automation and more human factor.

There were often still coding exercises. Your portfolio/work history mattered, as it does today.

I think there was much less awareness of "software engineering" (sustainable, scalable processes like source control, CI/CD, etc) as opposed to like, "just hire a guy who is smart and writes code good."

A lot of programming jobs at smaller shops were really kind of like hybrid sysadmin/coding jobs. You might also be fixing peoples' printer drivers and shit, in addition to coding reports and data imports or whatever.