If your company is still using LeetCode to interview engineers in 2025… dude.

It’s over. Done. Obsolete. Like asking a Formula 1 driver to take their test in a go-kart. But lowkey worse. 

LeetCode-style interviews reward speed, memorization, and repetition. They show you someone is willing to “grind” something that doesn’t make a lot of sense to get the job. They were always a bad proxy for engineering talent, but now that AI can ace most DSA problems instantly? It’s not even a proxy. It’s a formality.

The Problem with Puzzle-Based Interviews

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room:

• You’re testing grind, not skill. Engineers who spend 50 hours cramming for interviews will outperform better devs who were… you know… working.

• You’re wasting senior talent. Why are we putting experienced backend engineers through binary search trivia? It’s insulting.

• It’s cheatable. Have you heard of InterviewCoder yet? I mean ChatGPT can knock out a medium LeetCode question with a single prompt. You think candidates aren’t using it? 

• It kills candidate experience. Nobody walks away from a 4-hour whiteboard gauntlet thinking, "Wow, what a company!"

In short: you’re testing the wrong things, in the wrong format, and it’s hurting both sides of the table.

So What Actually Works?

If we want to evaluate engineers the way they work, we need to flip the model.

• Give them a real task.

• Let them work asynchronously.

• Use tools they’d actually use (IDEs, frameworks, documentation, StackOverflow, even AI).

• Then judge the result like you would in a code review.

This isn't lowering the bar. It's moving the bar to where it needed to be.

What We’re Doing About It

We built Prova because we were sick of pretending LeetCode was meaningful.

Prova gives candidates scoped, real-world challenges they complete in their own time. It evaluates their actual skills — debugging, architecture, tradeoffs — and gives you a detailed breakdown of what they did, how they thought, and whether it matches your bar.

Oh, and it takes zero engineering hours from your team.

It’s past time to switch it up. Interview like it’s 2025.