Comment by rachofsunshine
2 days ago
We don't ask "make the longest palindrome". We ask "convert this English into code that does what it says". If you want to make the discussion more concrete, we have a public practice problem [1] that we send out with our interview bookings so that people know what to expect. The real problems we ask are very similar to it.
Do you feel like there's anything there that any reasonably skilled programmer shouldn't be able to figure out on the fly?
[1] https://www.otherbranch.com/shared/practice-coding-problem
That's not a typical leetcode problem though. Most companies ask things like "solve this slightly modified knapsack problem" which takes 5 minutes if you know the solution and 50 minutes if you don't.
Yeah, it's very intentionally not a typical leetcode problem, precisely because leetcode is nearly worthless for screening people these days. I was replying to someone who seemed to be objecting to my opinion of some candidates' skills on the basis that maybe they just didn't know the specific thing we ask.