I don't think HR is usually on that level.

For example, suppose your team generates and shares some kind of data. You want to change the wire format. You could just go ahead and do it, letting the chips fall where they may, but I think that's bad engineering/engineering management.

It'd be better to coordinate with the folks consuming the data. Can you make their migration easier? While you're making a breaking change, are there others that would make sense to roll in? Are there times when it'd be better/worse to roll out the new version? Being proactive about this sort of stuff seems like good engineering to me.

All of those things are people management, and I agree people management is an important skill to have if you want to work in a big company in particular it isn't related to engineering. A guy who is completely non-verbal but makes a solar panel that is 5% more efficient is a great engineer, perhaps not liked by those around him but still a great engineer.

Terry Davis was a great engineer and he had the worst commutation skills you could imagine.

HR does not do that. They don't prioritize nor coordinate - unless you count getting people to company dinner as coordination. They do communicate, but rarely about product or how things are done or should be done.

And I don't mean that as criticism, I mean ythat as "it is not their job"

Yeah it sounds like 1x cope.

Same. The biggest point that I didn’t see in comments so far is that Leet Code exercices are really fast to evaluate and it accelerates the pipeline for filtering and hiring. Even a recruiter can “evaluate” them. Just looking at the code more or less and if the automatic tests pass. Which is not the case for exercises for engineers. If you want a real engineering problem it would be mostly about architecture which are long and hard to evaluate. Or about how to break down a rotten program and apply SOLID and other like that to redesign it. Same thing long and hard to evaluate.