Leetcode is dead

Maybe you heard about Roy Lee? He’s a 21-year-old CS student at Columbia (well, for now) who developed an “undetectable” program that observes problems presented in your remote interview meeting and solves them on an overlay that only you can see. “Interview Coder” eats leetcode for breakfast.

Roy used his tool in real interviews for positions at Meta, TikTok, and Amazon, and received offers. As soon as he came clean and started selling the tool, the offers were rescinded, though Roy told journalists that senior folks from large companies contacted him directly offering him jobs, no questions asked.

Let’s be clear: hiding a tool that’s doing all the work for you and pretending that you did it is cheating. Secretly using your calculator watch to remember the decimal for 1/8th of an inch (it’s 0.125 by the way) is also cheating. I thought I was pretty clever when I did it, though.

But Roy has been outspoken in interviews that he believes that leetcode problems are pointless. It would be like judging someone’s ability in journalism by how many jumping jacks they can do, he said on the Hard Fork podcast. I think he’s right, and with this explosion of AI tools, he’s more right than ever.

The “intent” of leetcode is that candidates have internalized all of these algorithmic approaches and can dance through really challenging and arcane problems as a result. What is actually happening is that CS students are spending hundreds of hours on the leetcode site, memorizing the solutions to the problems in the hope that one will be asked verbatim (which they usually are).

To my mind, this is like hiring whoever can remember the most digits of pi. The problem they’re trying to solve is that they have too many candidates and since they already filtered down to the ones with the most prestigious degrees or most relevant experience, the last hurdle is “have you done hundreds of hours of unpaid labor to try to work here?”

And now, in this age of ubiquitous, massive LLMs, we can see more clearly than ever that the king is not wearing any clothes.

The way software interviews are carried out has always been just a little bit bonkers. I mean, really, writing code on a whiteboard is as representative of real programming ability as building a model airplane is of your ability to build a real airplane. We wouldn’t ask a carpenter to demonstrate their ability to do the job without half of their actual tools, would we? Yet we do, all the time!

These leetcode problems themselves are so far from what most programmers encounter in their entire careers, and then we expect candidates to solve them in a weird little web IDE with shitty autocomplete.

I agree with Roy Lee, leetcode is cooked.

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