I’ve been hiring developers for decades at a Fortune 100 company and have never engaged in such nonsense. Unless you are hiring people to program chess sets, the question in the article is foolish. If you want to test their problem solving or coding skills, give them a problem from the actual work they will be doing at your company.
Sure. But do you know how often I’ve had to do backtracking in 25 years of professional programming? Zero times. Maybe the person is interviewing for a position where this kind of leetcode question is applicable, but in my experience this question is not abstracting real normal day to day problems.
I wish more companies thought that way. It seems like most of them are just cargo culting Google's hiring methods with the expectation that it will turn them into the next Google.
