If we're being honest, LC style interviews aren't even about testing skills, it's trying to proxy for testing raw intelligence (or at least the ability to remember and regurgitate lots of facts). If companies could just IQ test people and hire by IQ, there'd be a lot less weirdness in interviews, but that's illegal (and probably rightly so).
> The Act proscribes not only overt discrimination, but also practices that are > fair in form, but discriminatory in operation. The touchstone is business > necessity. If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes cannot > be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited.
(apologies for the dated and offensive language, starring it out seemed like it would imply a different and more offensive term so I left it as is)
My reading of it is that IQ tests aren't broadly illegal, but the employer would have to demonstrate that it's somehow related to job performance. E.g. one employer refused to hire people with too high of an IQ, and the courts ruled that was a reasonable (if unwise) justification [2].
I'm doubtful any case challenging LeetCode tests on the same grounds would succeed. I think it would be exceptionally difficult to convince a court that solving coding problems is unrelated to a programmer's job performance.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
2: https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...
I bet many involved in designing and setting the requirements know exactly how it works but they'd use veiled language and never put anything down in written communication.
IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Maybe IQ doesn't exactly track "intelligence", or whatever that is, but it is certainly tracking something that is correlated to success.
You could probably screen candidates based on the question "Did any of your parents go to college? And if so, did they study or work in a STEM field?" and be roughly as predictable.
(This is terrible and you shouldn't do this)
high quality studies have found that the additive heritability of IQ is somewhere around 0.8-0.9, that's just totally incompatible with parental SES as the primary upstream cause. it's simply not debatable (and it wasn't debatable ten years ago either; this is hardly new knowledge)
The fact that people can just cheat in these interviews and not get PIP'd within 6 months, at an organization notorious for PIPing its under-performers, does illustrate how bad the screening process it. Not only do they need to shift back to in-person interviews, they also need to fix their process to actually test skills.