It's a very practicable metric that enables you to show that you're worth getting a top job in interviews. It's very merit based even if that merit is less being a good SWE and more being good at problem solving + self discipline.

It's actually not. It has been shown that you can get extremely good Leetcode ratings by systematically learning their 15-20 most used patterns. This can be done easily in a sort time span. Guides how to achieve this can be found on Reddit.

Same happens to students if they start to memorize old training exams systematically. They exploit that professors and their assistants will recycle/adapt a decent amount of old questions. Doing this is cheap in terms of effort compared trying to understanding everything.

Of course people that succeed in LC tests will defend it. Gatekeeping is a natural response.

That's reason why we stopped using it and spent much effort in eliminating any possible preparability. You get highly qualified pattern matching monkeys if you offer them the stuff they are trained for.

But 10-15 years experience has to count for something. Why do senior and principle positions still need to leet code interviews?

Because there are a lot of fraudsters.

With social skills and salesmanship, you can never have delivered top-class work even after 15 years as a developer.

Quite a few people know how to "play the game". That's pretty easy if your superiors have no idea about software development themselves.

boycotting the thing that puts a roof over your head is a luxury few can afford

SWEs will happily tell you that their profession is such a highly demanded activity and they don't need a union because the pay/benefits are so excellent.

However, I think this comment highlights the fact that swes are not some privileged elite above at least some of the benefits of organized labour.

the leetcode will continue until union perception improves.

A lot of developers that aren't purely obsessed with frontend or AI-like niches find Leetcoding rote. Ultimately it's just about facing a question you are unfamiliar with and whiteboarding it with a potential employer - it's only humiliating if you've got an ego to swallow.

I think that might be a bit narrow. It's humiliating not because you need to bear your ignorance in front of a judgemental audience. (although that part certainly is not comfortable) It's humiliating because the leetcode is not actually representative of anything you'll need to know to do the job. It's an exercise which selections for who can jump through the most hoops, and doesn't really select for the actual job skills.

That depends entirely on the problem they ask you to solve. All the technical interviews I've done have been completely reasonable basic programming tasks. Yet I always get really good feedback, did one a few weeks ago where the interviewer said it was the best technical interview he'd had in years. I felt like it could have gone better, and like I could have done just as well years ago when I was fresh out of university.

So that tells me that a lot of devs really suck at basic programming, I assume they're the ones joking that their job is just copying code from SO. And probably also the ones who complain about having to show that they can write code before being hired to write code.

Personally I think it's great. Easy way to show that I know my shit and separate myself from all my peers who somehow graduated with the same degree as me despite not being able to write a correct fizzbuzz after 3 years. I'll take a live coding interview any time. I know I'm good at this, don't mind proving it.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I think we probably disagree when it comes to leetcode. One thing I'll note is that in my experience, companies implicitly do not _want_ you to work at too high of a level; they fill up your hours until there is no free time, prevent you from returning to older tasks or projects to improve them, and more or less require "good enough" solutions at best.

This isn't necessarily meant as a complaint, but this is yet another way in which leet code may not really fit the job that's being performed; the company is attempting to get as much work done as possible and for whatever reason is not very incentivized to ensure that the work is done to a high standard. In other words, the super complex leet code sorts of techniques will just never in practice be utilized.

Now to your point, whether or not you find yourself in this situation is going to depend on your job and your company.

I've never really done much leetcode. Might have done a problem here and there for fun but probably less than 10 total.

I'm not sure whether people literally mean leetcode when they say leetcode, but I should probably clarify that I'm not specifically talking about problems from the leetcode website. I did once get a sort of quiz from codingame to complete at home(took like 15 minutes or so), but other than that I think my interviewers have made up their own problems.

One was a class responsible for storing car data, being able to get them by plate number and stuff like that. Recently I did one where I basically implemented a tax calculator, calculating bracket tax and stuff like that. The general format has been a class with method stubs, and a corresponding test class. The assignment is basically make the tests pass.

I think that's a good format. Allows you to write some real logic, sort of similar to what we do in daily work. The tax calculator was a bit math-heavy but still required some logic and some creative use of data structures to store tax brackets without hardcoding everything etc.

what does frontend or AI have to do with making your point?