Did you mean to type 25? 5 years ago LC challenge were as, if not more, prevalent than they are today. And a single interview for a job is not something I have seen ever after 15 years in the space (and a bunch of successful OSS projects I can showcase).

I actually have the feeling it’s not as hardcore as it used to be on average. E.g. OpenAI doesn’t have a straight up LC interview even though they probably are the most sought after company. Google and MS and others still do it, but it feel like it has less weight in the final feedback than it did before. Most en-vogue startup have also ditched it for real world coding excercices.

Probably due to the fact that LC has been thoroughly gamed and is even less a useful signal than it was before.

Of course some still do, like Anthropic were you have to have a perfect score to 4 leetcode questions, automatically judged with no human contact, the worst kind of interview.

Not sure if that's a typo. 5 years ago was also pretty LC-heavy.

Ten years ago it was more based on Cracking the Coding Interview.

So i'd guess what you're referring to is even older than that.

I read this, and intentionally did not read the replies below. You are so wrong. You can write a library, even an entirely new language from scratch, and you will still be denied employment for that library/language.

> 5 years ago you'd have a project like that, talk to someone at a company for like 30m-1hr about it, and then get an offer.

Based on my own experiences, that was true 25 years ago. 20 years ago, coding puzzles were now a standard part of interviewing, but it was pretty lightweight. 5 years ago (covid!) everything was leet-code to get to the interview stage.

I have been getting grilled on leet code style questions since the beginning my of my career over 12 years ago.

The faangs jump and then the rest of the industry does some dogshit imitation of their process