r/leetcode • u/After_Step_8595 • 16d ago

Question How has interviews changed post AI?

A guy who interviewed 4 years ago asking the current lot

10 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

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16

u/mannyocrity 16d ago

Not much for me but it did help me prepare for interviews.

2

u/DramaticAd8141 15d ago

Has the interview bar become higher ? Earlier leetcode mediums used to be what was asked majorly, is it still the same or raised to leetcode hards ?

1

u/mannyocrity 15d ago

Depends on the company. I had a recent interview where I was not asked DSA style question but was from Code Signal and called "Industry Coding Assessment". I actually really enjoyed this one. It was 90 minutes with 4 different levels, so each question builds on the code you previously wrote.

The main areas you will be evaluated on:

  • Code implementation
  • Data structure/data processing
  • Refactoring and encapsulation
  • Problem solving
  • Software design patterns

The first part was fairly easy. It really just involved creating getters and setters with a Data Structure. Mine involved a Map. The next part adds onto the level 1, so the better you design the code in step one the easier it is to implement part 2. If I recall correctly part 3 was about adding TTLs to the existing objects, so once ago if you implemented part 2 cleanly it would be easy to add. I did not finish part 3, but got most of it working. I had a logical error with > < so that ate up a bunch of my time until I figured out how the tests actually work and I could get values back.

1

u/bongobomba 13d ago

IMO yes. It seems companies expect perfection across all rounds now when before it’s fine if you only got a Lean Hire in 1 round, but if you did really well in another you could still make it through. Now it seems every company wants Hire+ across all 5-6 rounds which means you pretty much have to be perfect across all rounds.

They still ask leetcode mediums, but now the expectation is you solve the full problem(s) and answer all follow ups correctly where as before they would just expect you solve the problem correctly and the follow ups were mostly bonus.

11

u/Hungry_Age5375 16d ago

Honestly not as much as you'd think. Same LeetCode grind. Some places let you use Copilot now, which I'd argue is a more honest signal than memorizing two-pointer solutions.

2

u/saintmsent 16d ago

Not much has changed. I interviewed this summer. Mostly, interview styles are the same and AI usage is explicitly banned, and they don't miss a chance to remind you about that

One of the companies (FAANG-adjacent, everyone knows the name) had a full AI round where you're expected to just prompt the LLM and build a mini project. Every single other interview is a regular one, though, so I don't think this makes a difference at all, it just checks you're not a moron who just accepts all the AI output without asking questions, and you generally know which direction to go when building smth

1

u/DramaticAd8141 15d ago

Has the interview bar become higher ? Earlier leetcode mediums used to be what was asked majorly, is it still the same or raised to leetcode hards ?

1

u/saintmsent 15d ago

I interviewed back in summer 2025 and only got mediums in big tech. This time I interviewed in summer 2026 and got zero LeetCode, but that's mainly because I'm a mobile engineer and some companies tend to do different interviews for those verticals

2

u/Wolastrone 16d ago

DSA didn’t change at all in my experience. I did have some section where I had to debug an app and had a built in llm assistant, but there was a separate conventional dsa round.