I've become partial to interview questions where the interviewee just has to build something like a rock paper scissors game or command line to do list app. Simple prompt, easily extendable as well. It's jarring how many people with 5+ years of experience completely fail on this kind of interview.
Any experienced engineer should have no trouble with it. There's no hiding here. - candidate just needs to deliver something working, something relatively clean, and be reasonably pleasant to pair with. No leetcode grinding necessary, though I have found that those who did well on this problem also generally got high scores from my colleagues who do ask LC questions.
I somehow ended up responsible for the coding interview part at a small startup, and I'm pleased to say that it doesn't involve any niche algorithm memorization or specific language knowledge.
It's really just a scenario with some mockup third-party API docs, where the applicant needs to write some paeudocode that checks different conditions, arranges the data, and ties together the different calls.
It might not be testing every possible skill the applicant has, but at least it's in-line with one of the tasks we actually expect them to perform regularly.
Any experienced engineer should have no trouble with it. There's no hiding here. - candidate just needs to deliver something working, something relatively clean, and be reasonably pleasant to pair with. No leetcode grinding necessary, though I have found that those who did well on this problem also generally got high scores from my colleagues who do ask LC questions.