I don't think this is true. At the big companies that do leetcode interviews, my understanding is that the process is rather inflexible. Doesn't matter what your past accomplishments are, you go through the same pipeline as everyone else.

Recently I was chatting with a young woman who competes in motorcycle racing at an international level. She's almost old enough to get a driver's license to drive on public roads. Do you think she gets to skip the driving test because she can ride better than all but a few people in the country? No, she'll do figure eights in a parking lot like everyone else.

Big company bureaucracy functions similarly to government bureaucracy. The rules are built for the common case and exceptions for individuals, however reasonable, are hard to make.

I don't think that quite holds true. Big companies often have different pipelines when hiring for specific roles within special projects. When applying for a general software role, you typically get interviewed by random software enginespe, and so you end up with a fair amount of canned leetcode style questions. When applying for a specific role within a project, you typically get interviewed by engineers on that project; the interviews are usually more domain specific and less leedcodey.

Yes, this might be true for certain roles and certain companies. My understanding is that Google and Facebook have centralized hiring pipelines and so an exception would be a lot more unique than, say, Microsoft, where each org/ team defines their own standards and requirements. (By the way, this is why internal transfers at MS can require an interview process. Some orgs don't trust the hiring standards of other orgs and have rules for which transfers require a technical interview and which don't.)

My comment was based on my personal experience when I worked at Google. I'm mainly an embedded software engineer, though, so I tend to get pinged for more niche projects. Google does internal interviews as well, at least when hopping between letters of the "Alphabet".

When I interviewed, one or two of the questions were stereotypical "reverse the string in Pig Latin while solving tic-tac-toe" or whatever. Most of the questions were directly relevant to real-time safety-critical embedded systems stuff though.

At some point while I was there, Google did some viral marketing leetcode foobar challenge recruiting thing. If you searched for certain keywords, your web browser would do a fancy 3D zoom effect and then give you coding challenges. I did some of them for a couple hours one time. Some of them were tricky word problems, but algorithmically none of them were particularly difficult. The only one I remember had maybe 5 paragraphs of text, and my solution was literally one line of python.

> I don't think they will have to white-board to get a job ever again.

But: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en

I think they'll never have to fizzbuzz again, but probably still lots of whiteboarding in their future.