I bet the genuine answer to your question is that she knows it's a resource that could help tons of people (at a time when tons of people need that help) and paywalling it means that it won't serve that same purpose.

The writing is on the wall for Leetcode-style interviewing. The signal-to-noise ratio is diminishing in the age of AI (cheating). These sorts of puzzle challenges might no longer play a meaningful role going forward.

So the PRO is that anyone can become a SW engineer, but the CON is that when anyone can become a SW engineer you're competing with soo many people on an even playing field that weeding out the wheat from the chaff is tricky and no company had the perfect solution because it doesn't exist.

What other engineering profession things change so fast that tools from ~20 years ago (C, PHP, Perl, etc) are not useful on the job market anymore? What other engineering profession gets hundreds/thousands of applicants per open position? What other engineering profession has such a lack of standardization that every company works completely different, with different tools and different processes to ultimately do the same thing?

In most other traditional engineering disciplines it's not just the university degree or credential that matters to getting in, but a lot of critical knowledge can only be gained from mentoring and learning at the job from graybeards of the industry, knowledge you'll never get if you try to teach yourself, even if technically all the relevant courses and information is freely available online. Not to mention that in a lot of engineering professions the tooling is specialized, non-FOSS and very $$$, so your only chance of touching it is at university or a company who will pay you to get certified in that tooling.

They also tend to pay less

Preparing for interviews is a small price to pay

I'm not necessarily arguing that software engineering should have some gatekeeping organization that you need to prove yourself to, but you take the good with the bad. In other engineering disciplines, a third party organization takes the responsibility of filtering out the unqualified people. In software, the hiring companies have to do it, so you end up with the first interview (at least) being spent just proving you're not lying about every single thing on your resume.

The idea all tech companies require you to know niche data structures is kind of a meme honestly. I'm sure some do but not the ones I've interviewed at at least.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please don't fulminate.

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's fine and welcome here to critique anything, we're just trying to make HN something other than a ragefest, particularly about topics that people have been saying the same enraged things about for a long time.

When the same things have been said about an issue for a long time, it's time to think about new ideas and new solutions to that issue.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You don't need Leetcode style tests to weed those out. Much simpler problems will do it.

1. Raw mental horsepower

2. The ability to just repeatedly do focused learning, aka just grinding

And sure, it probably does favor #2 these days - but that is a critically important skill. You can trade one for the other, but everybody has some amount of both, and these questions figure out, roughly, your computed aggregate score of these.

They have a very high false negative rate, but an exceptionally low false positive rate for a 60 minute interview, so it works very well in companies with large interview candidate pipelines.

Maybe we have different things in mind when we say "leet-code questions".

I don't know why leet-code style interviews would discourage the things you mentioned.

But I did have one job working on an AI graph compiler which used fancy algorithms all over the place. In practice though I found the space between "use the standard library" and "it's NP-complete; use heuristics" where the answer is "you can use this neat dynamic programming trick" is basically nonexistent.

They could cheat on the take-home but it isn't meant to be difficult and you hopefully figured out at the in-person that they're someone who wouldn't need to bother cheating.

Not that I agree with absurd interview process of software development but they often see themselves more akin to attorneys than tradesmen. The difference being attorneys have to pass a bar exam and even trades have journeyman cards to provide credibility.

Software development has none of that. Real engineering has PE licenses but how do you achieve that in such a broadly scoped field of software development?

We either play the interview game or find a way around it.

staging [1] is very much a thing for kitchen staff

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staging_(cooking)

We built it this way on purpose, though... the intent is to mimic an interview and gently force you to talk through your thought process, not to have yet another LeetCode clone.