Leetcode interviews are in general just incredibly poor signal-to-ratio; especially with the advent of LLMs making it easier than ever to just cheat on the problem. I would just generally assume that any company with that as an initial barrier isn't actually looking to hire anyone at all, but for the sake of 'appearing' to have employee growth.
I’ve seen many companies try to do something more relevant in the technical interview, it still suffers from “which data structure manipulation method happens to be available in this framework and have you seen it recently”
Regarding “cheating” with an LLM, there is not unanimous consensus on that either. I’ve been in technical interviews where the collaborative coding tool had an LLM built right in, and I was encouraged to use it. If thats what I’m going to do at the company then demonstrating problem solving that way is useful.
