My career predates the leetcode phenomenon, and I always found it mystifying. My hot take is that it’s what happens when you’re hiring what are essentially human compilers: they can spit out boilerplate solutions at high speed, and that’s what leetcode is testing for.

For someone like that, LLMs are much closer to literally replacing what they do, which seems to explain a lot of the complaints. They’re also not used to working at a higher level, so effective LLM use doesn’t come naturally to them.