(Note I am saying people who "believe" they cannot get a good job. This would be people who worry a lot, people with unusual experiences that other companies avoid, and under-performers who got fired. I am sure there will be some great hires in those groups, but likely less than during regular hiring)
Are you suggesting that any coding interviews and challenges are simply removed from the existing processes? That just means you end up with more candidates to choose from, which doesn't sound helpful at all if your goal is to end up with better hires as the comment above was suggesting.
No, the hiring managers that are into cargoogle culting are not actually that interested in how to do interviewing properly. Not unless, say, google does it and they can copy it.
For them the important thing is that leetcode is a safe, defensible choice because "everyone else does it that way".
This is based on a real system I designed and have been maintaining for ~5 years, and is also very similar to other systems I've run at previous jobs.
About half the candidates complain that it's not a realistic question.
What would be a "proper" interview in your opinion?
I think this is exactly what a lot of companies try to do when interviewing. Depending on how much time they want candidates and interviewers to spend on the task, this ranges from leetcode-style problems to bigger coding challenges (possibly with some debugging or collaboration involved).
What would you suggest concretely?
If you think leetcode is representative of real life programming you're probably a college student.
Is reading a book on software engineering to become a better programmer also not allowed?
I feel like people want these jobs to be distributed "fairly" based on "natural" ability/talent.
But it has never and will never work that way.
Fair question.. the problem today is the emphasis on studying and practicing irrelevant things like memorizing algorithms. That's become the paved short-cut to well paying jobs so naturally people do it. To the point that even the people doing the hiring have forgotten what it meant to be actually qualified, not just a leetcode memorizer.
If you need to hire a musician for your band, do you pick the person who has spent six months practicing a handful of chords to perfection, but possibly doesn't know anything about composing songs or jamming with the band? Or do you pick someone who has been composing and playing live shows for 10+ years?
The first one is just academic memorization that has some value, but very little. The second one is real-life experience that's worth a lot.
I have zero musical skills but even I have managed to learn to play a couple songs on the piano by sheer memorization of which buttons to press in what sequence. If you ask me to play one of those songs it might seem like I know what I'm doing even though I'm completely incompetent in music. That's the equivalent of hiring for software roles based on leetcode memorization.
Most interview loops at places that do algorithm interviews are 2-3 rounds and each round will have up to 2 questions. Its very very unlikely the interviewee will only encountered questions they have memorized.
More likely, the interviewee encounters questions similar to ones they have solved and they know the pattern around solving, then are able to apply their learned skill to the new problem.
Similar to your music analogy: you can absolutely be a strong guitar player in a band if you just memorize a few different chord shapes and can apply them up and down the fretboard to different keys (lookup the "CAGED system").
We all part from the same place (understand me: from the standpoint of the hirer, I know we have different vital stories). They open the position to all of us and want to be impressed. The one that makes it, gets the job.
It is the best way? Absolutely not. Is it unfair? No.
