Death to Leetcode

I was rejected for doing leetcode too slow.

Mars Rover. My answer was nearly perfect but I ran out of time for phase 2. Rejected.

My home language is Ruby. There was no Ruby option. I went with JavaScript. I asked how to write a switch/case in JS. Forgot to use return—Ruby implicit return habit. Other than that, the code worked immediately. No major changes. Careful, methodical work.

Rejected. No reason, we moved on to other candidates.

This style of interview is dead. It’s shit. AI solves these problems faster than any human now. The entire premise is broken.

I’ve been on the other side of the table recently. I did it my way. No leetcode. A case study. A conversation about architecture. We spotted depth immediately.

Some juniors could diagram the solution. They could flow through the case study. They got it.

Seniors, some with over five years of experience, couldn’t get past “middleware.” They’d tell me they prefer event-driven architectures but couldn’t tell me why. No tradeoffs. No reasoning. Just buzzwords they’d memorized for interviews exactly like the ones that rejected me.

Things can be googled on the job, and now AI can answer in 5 seconds. What can’t be googled is depth.

Death to leetcode.