Not necessarily. It just means that they weren't good at recruiting, they could still have a great team to work with.

It does tell you that the people working there practiced leetcode and puzzles in their free time (assuming they went through the same filter)

Hilariously not in many cases. One of my old jobs introduced leetcode, particularly trees for interviewing. Nobody currently there could solve those.

But a new engineer was assigned to handle interviewing and it was all about a couple of leetcode problems he found on the internet.

This. I interviewed with a company that I really wanted to work with, was overqualified for the job, and would have thrived in it...

The HR person was a complete dolt though, and didnt even understand how to interview me properly...

Sucks - I still respect the company, but their recruiting method was piss-poor..

How do you recruit a great team if they’re bad at recruiting?

If they put together most of the team another way, then it would be fine.

My prior company would have interns do leetcode and system design. Intermediates and up had some paired code writing and a far less formal system design discussion.

Most of the team might have been hired through a network and you only get leetcoded as an external unknown.

Where I work our team gets to review applications (pre-filtered) for candidates we are interested in. Those candidates are then given a general technical exercise. We get to review the results and ask follow up questions, but we basically get zero input into what kinds of questions are asked. I could 100% see a scenario where the people who manage the recruitment process replace that general exercise with some third-party online solution like hacker rank or whatever.

Parent commenter.

The job description was top notch. It was a clear description of what they needed this engineering role to do. Inspire of it being a bit of a niche, I had almost perfect set of experiences from my prior jobs that made it very interesting.

Fun because it would have given me an opportunity to _improve_ upon my already bootstrapped skills. Productive because, I already have a head start than another engineer getting into the groove of things. This is HN, I can be tech specific :-) I have worked a lot on performance from HPC perspective. The job was at a High Frequency Trading platform that needed a sys.engineer who would work on extracting performance with things like pinning a CPU core to a process and several optimisations at the OS and kernel that would shave off a few milliseconds in an already fast application.