It would take something like one week full time to work on this. It's not something you can do if you have a full-time job and apply to several other companies. I find it unreasonable to ask a candidate to spend that much time for an uncertain result.
It's true that being ready for leetcode takes practice, but at least it's standard so you can re-use the skills to other interviews. Optimizing some generated code is certainly fun, but it's as useless as leetcode for your average programmer.
As long as there are qualified candidates willing to do unreasonable tasks for the chance to work at a company, there's not much incentive for the company to change their system. Those people will also probably work unreasonably hard and make unreasonable sacrifices for the company.
> It's not something you can do if you have a full-time job
> I find it unreasonable to ask a candidate to spend that much time
And same for some reason does not apply to leetcode style interviews?
> It would take something like one week full time to work on this
I am not sure if this is satire or what? You need months of continuous preparation to be ready for the leetcode style interview.
> Optimizing some generated code is certainly fun, but it's as useless as leetcode for your average programmer.
No, it is not. This is specifically the type of job you would be doing tomorrow at Anthropic team if hired. And they are specifically hiring people who are already good enough at that very task. The same cannot be said for the leetcode, not even remotely comparable.
It's true that being ready for leetcode takes practice, but at least it's standard so you can re-use the skills to other interviews. Optimizing some generated code is certainly fun, but it's as useless as leetcode for your average programmer.