I don't think he "fooled the interviewers." The point of the story is that he focussed down on what the company's culture decided was important.
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That's the point we all see, but from context, the story teller apparently thought it shows that leetcode is an effective way to filter frauds.
And it is an effective way.
It's memorization, not understanding. It is not effective.
Memorizing is the first step to understanding. In grade school, one memorizes the alphabet for a good reason.
It's like cramming for an exam. Yes you can get enough information in your short term memory to pass, even do well. But a year later (or a month) it's all gone. You never really knew it.
True, but it shows a willingness and ability to do the work.
Such recruiting selects for KPI hunters. It is probably bad for an org to select for people that game it rather than doing "what is right".
A dice throw and some chitchat would be better recruiting.
These arguments all sound familiar to the "high stakes testing" debate about the SATs. The tests were unfair, did not measure college readiness, could be gamed, etc.
Then universities dropped the SAT requirements. Even MIT was suckered into dropping them. It was a disaster. It turns out the SATs were a very strong predictor of college success. MIT and others reinstated the SATs.
Ways SAT is more reasonable than typical leetcode interview:
- you can take it ~3 times and most colleges will give you the best score without penalty
- you can use your result to apply as many times as you want
- if you feel stuck you can still get a good score by moving on to the other problems
- it's administered uniformly across the world
- you don't need to narrate your thinking while you're still processing information
- you get an objective score instead of a pass/fail that may be subjectiveAll true, but still the arguments presented here sound the same as the arguments against SATs and "high stakes testing". I checked a bunch of major software companies, and all of them used leetcode as a screening device. (Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Apple, Anthropic)