---
title: "If you ever used DSA interviews, your fraud is now exposed"
subtitle: "LeetCode was never engineering"
description: "DSA interviews replaced judgment with ritual. Now that machines have solved the ritual, companies still using it are exposing that they never knew how to hire engineers."
author: "Pau Friedman"
kind: "essay"
published_at: "2026-06-10"
url: "https://pau.fm/blog/2026/06/10/if-you-ever-used-dsa-interviews-your-fraud-is-now-exposed"
markdown_url: "https://pau.fm/blog/2026/06/10/if-you-ever-used-dsa-interviews-your-fraud-is-now-exposed.md"
canonical_url: "https://pau.fm/blog/2026/06/10/if-you-ever-used-dsa-interviews-your-fraud-is-now-exposed"
---

# If you ever used DSA interviews\, your fraud is now exposed

> LeetCode was never engineering

If you ever used data structures and algorithms interviews to hire software engineers, your fraud is
now exposed.

DSA interviews were never a good proxy for engineering, and this was blindingly obvious to anyone
who had ever shipped software. They were a crutch: a way to avoid the hard work of judging whether a
person actually brought useful skills to a team. Google designed them for a specific problem—hiring
engineers at enormous scale to work on enormous-scale problems. You copied the visible part, and
LeetCode became a substitute for any critical thinking you might otherwise have had to do.

Candidates responded rationally, of course. They studied the test. An entire curriculum emerged
around problems most engineers rarely encountered in actual work and now, increasingly, never will.
Success reflected time, coaching, pedigree, and familiarity with the ritual at least as much as
engineering ability.

The fact that you could “study” for the interview should have made the farce obvious. Instead,
programmers wrapped the whole thing in meritocratic language and enjoyed the smug satisfaction of
admitting only people willing and able to jump through their inane hoops into the little cabal.

How many lines of code have you written in the past year? If it’s more than zero, ask yourself why.
The valuable work was already problem framing, systems understanding, judgment, verification, and
tradeoffs. Now that is increasingly the whole job. Why are you hiring a human based on their ability
to perform a task that machines have effectively solved?

If you are still running DSA screens in 2026, you are admitting that you never had a serious theory
of how to hire engineers in the first place.

_Disclaimer: as a hiring manager, I have never once given a candidate a DSA interview, because I
always thought they were incredibly stupid. I was right all along and now there is incontrovertible
proof._