Unpopular opinion: Leetcode interviews are filtering out the best startup engineers

The engineers who built the most impressive things I've seen never practiced Leetcode.

They learned by shipping.

They debugged at midnight. They read someone else's broken code and fixed it. They reverse-engineered systems nobody documented. They optimized something 40% faster because it was slow and that bothered them.

None of that shows up in a binary search question.

Startups especially can't afford this mistake.

You don't need someone who can invert a binary tree in 20 minutes.

You need someone who will stay until the problem is solved, figure out what they don't know, and ship something real by Friday.

Those two people are almost never the same person.

I get why big companies use it. It scales screening.

But for a 5-person startup copying the same playbook?

You're optimizing for the wrong signal entirely.

The best hire I've seen for an early stage company was someone with a portfolio of things they built, zero competitive programming experience, and a genuine inability to leave a problem unsolved.

That's the filter that actually works.

What do you think? Am I wrong?