Beyond LeetCode: Interviewing for real engineering impact For years, technical interviews have relied heavily on LeetCode-style problems: algorithms, data structures, and whiteboard puzzles. While these can test pattern recognition and persistence, they rarely reflect the realities of day-to-day engineering. The gap between “acing the interview” and “thriving in the role” has grown too wide. Attracting and hiring great engineers requires a better approach, one rooted in simulating real work environments. Candidates want to demonstrate how they’ll perform on the job, not just how quickly they can invert a binary tree. Companies, in turn, want a signal that maps directly to on-the-job success. Why LeetCode falls short Artificial problems: Most questions don’t resemble the real-world challenges engineers would face if they were to earn the role. Signal distortion: Great engineers who excel at building systems may underperform on contrived puzzles. Bias toward test-takers: Success often depends more on practice hours than genuine engineering impact. Candidate experience: Many engineers leave these interviews feeling frustrated and/or misjudged. A better way: simulating real work The new model of interviewing focuses on practical exercises that mirror engineering responsibilities: Code review: Candidates review a realistic pull request, identify bugs, suggest improvements, and weigh readability against performance. Production incident simulation: Candidates are asked to triage a mock outage, analyze logs, and communicate their thought process under time pressure. System design for scale: Candidates design a scalable component with explicit trade-offs in mind: performance vs. cost, latency vs. availability. If you’re rethinking your interview process, start small: Introduce a code review exercise, run a lightweight incident simulation, or add a collaborative design discussion. Each step moves you closer to interviews that feel authentic, generate stronger signals, and build trust with candidates from day one. We’ve seen this firsthand: At Infinitus, onsite scheduling time dropped by nearly 40%, employee happiness with the process increased by 25%, candidate experience scores rose, and offer conversion improved compared to our old process. Small shifts, big impact. Here’s why it works: Higher-fidelity signal: You measure the exact skills engineers use day-to-day. Better candidate experience: Candidates feel they have the chance to showcase meaningful strengths. Attractive to top talent: The best engineers are drawn to companies that respect their craft and time. Cultural alignment: The process highlights collaboration, pragmatism, and resilience, the same traits that drive engineering success. The future of hiring engineers LeetCode-style problems may have once been a convenient shortcut for scaling interviews. But the best companies are moving beyond shortcuts. They design processes that simulate real engineering work, producing better hiring outcomes and building stronger teams. In my own experience, the strongest signals in hiring have come not from algorithm puzzles, but from seeing how candidates collaborate on design, reason about tradeoffs, and navigate ambiguity, the exact skills they’ll use day-to-day. That’s what truly predicts success on the job. By treating interviews as a microcosm of the job itself – code reviews, incident response, and system design – you not only get a more accurate signal, but also send a message: this is a place where great engineering is valued, collaboration is real, and growth is built into the culture. It’s something we feel strongly about at Infinitus. We believe the companies that embrace this shift won’t just hire better, they’ll attract the engineers who want to solve real problems, at scale, in the real world. And if that’s something that resonates with you, good news: We’re hiring. You can check out our open roles here.