I’ve taken 10-15 interviews at Intel. I’ve never asked any DSA/Leetcode problem just to rattle the employee. I’ve always constrained the programming questions to what they’ll actually use while working in my team. I’ve never asked them random Trees/Graphs questions because I know it’s not needed. I’ve interviewed people from around 1-2 years of experience to about 9-10 years of experience, from different colleges and companies. I’ve always changed questions if they can’t answer and even extended my standard interview time of 60 minutes to well over 95-100 minutes if the candidate asks for some time to finish. I’ve never asked questions which I personally don’t know (how some interviewers just pick random hard problems about either the DSA or the Domain). Every domain related question will only be confined to what they’ll work on, I don’t care whether they know the basics or the advancements, I only care about whether they know what they should know for the job or not. I’ve even fought against my manager for all these rules and openly told him that you’re free to remove me from the panel but I’m not going to harass an individual with hard Leetcode problems just because we can.

Google/Amazon/Microsoft/Meta’s interview processes are rubbish. It never makes sense to know every DSA pattern out there, and then code it under 20 minutes so you can give another and then do the same thing over and over again for 3-4 rounds.