As an aside, I tell people looking to go into software engineering that the best thing you could bring to an interview is a shipping app. The bar is such that most people ought to be able to push something out to the App Store or wherever.
Second best is a GitHub repo but often those I have seen simply included test apps resulting from a CS course or perhaps worse, code copied from somewhere else.
Regardless, app or code (or both) give the interviewer something else to talk about with the candidate about (and you would expect a good deal of enthusiasm from the candidate in this kind of discussion).
There are many leetcode champs who are completely helpless in front of a computer.
The premise of emphasizing leetcode is to get developers who can solve problems fast.
But if the only thing someone knows is competitive programming, and not operating systems, distributed systems, network protocols, serialization formats, libraries and frameworks and pretty much everything that's required to implement actual software, that person won't be able to solve problems fast. In fact, that person may reinvent the square wheel and waste resources.
None of the large tech companies care if you have shipped an app or have open source work. Even as a regular old journeyman “enterprise developer” from 1996-2020, I’ve never been asked about open source work.
The only reason I have any open source work on GitHub now - I stopped programming as a hobby the minute I graduated from college in 1996 - is because my company has a very straightforward open source process where I can open source reusable project work I do for customers (consulting).
What would you replace leetcode with? For all its faults, and I agree there are many, leetcode is at least more or less objective and (for employers) very cheap.
