If a LC interview effectively serves as a proxy for an IQ test, then I think the courts might treat it the same as a literal IQ test. I wonder if we will see lawsuits testing this hypothesis.
The precedent for the illegality of IQ tests for employment is Griggs v Duke Power Co. [1] if I'm not mistaken. The court ruled:
> The Act proscribes not only overt discrimination, but also practices that are
> fair in form, but discriminatory in operation. The touchstone is business
> necessity. If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes cannot
> be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited.
(apologies for the dated and offensive language, starring it out seemed like it would imply a different and more offensive term so I left it as is)
My reading of it is that IQ tests aren't broadly illegal, but the employer would have to demonstrate that it's somehow related to job performance. E.g. one employer refused to hire people with too high of an IQ, and the courts ruled that was a reasonable (if unwise) justification [2].
I'm doubtful any case challenging LeetCode tests on the same grounds would succeed. I think it would be exceptionally difficult to convince a court that solving coding problems is unrelated to a programmer's job performance.
If they can proven to be so. What employees do is then build a proxy for IQ tests that has some job related stuff. Math or logic puzzles could be used if they relate to CS topics. It's not just "find the next element in the pattern" but "find the next sorted item in a list" and so on. They could argue that "Well the employee could in principle be inverting binary trees all day at their job..."
I bet many involved in designing and setting the requirements know exactly how it works but they'd use veiled language and never put anything down in written communication.
