With all those leetcode acers, why is software slow as molasses? You would think they pattern match for the most efficient algo with all this training.

In my experience the more impressive somebody is at leet code, the worse their production code. Full of bugs, no error handling. Assuming the inputs never stray from the happy path.

Not saying it's always the case of course. But I did interview almost 400 people over my career.

On the other hand, most people cannot code to save their life. So I have no answers. Only more questions.

>Get good at it

>with no prep.

You contradicted yourself in the same sentence. You can't get good at leetcoding interviews with no prep

Interviews need to give signal to the employer. Having a couple decades experience now, working high scale, highly available services, and having designed interviews for thousands of candidates and given hundreds of interviews across half a dozen software engineering orgs, leetcode is poor signal.

Good signals comes from questions that uncover attributes that will grow your team snd fill deficits.

The best method yet for a technical interview is a work sample test based on recent work actually performed by the team. I've never encountered a leetcode problem in the wild. Data structures and algorithms, of course. Leetcode? Nope.

But leetcode is easy to administer and someone else already wrote the question. The big companies don't even try to differentiate between those who clearly have practiced the given leetcode problem type vs someone who derives a solution by working the problem.