Good ways to weed out people who fixate on grinding LeetCode?

I find a 30 min technical interview really weeds them out. Ask them what they think about so and so technology that they put on their resume. "Why do you prefer MVVM over MVC? What's your experience with Jetpack? Why did you migrate code over to Jetpack over something like RxJava? You put TDD on your resume, is there any reason you prefer that over just writing tests on completed code? You mentioned functional programming on your resume, but why didn't you put a map() here?"

These questions are basically fizzbuzz for those who have done the work. But you'd be surprised how many people do things for absolutely no reason.

The downside is people tend to hire them anyway when they flunk the technical interview but have excellent leetcode score. One is fairly subjective, the other is objective, and people tend to lean towards the subjective one. You can work around this by having two technical interviewers, but they have to be fairly senior enough to trust.

Asking open ended questions, is where you can really gauge people. ie: What was the toughest coding problem you had to deal with at your last/current job? Tell me about the last time you needed to ask for help with a coding issue, where you had exhausted all options on your end?

etc etc

Edit: I help with hiring at the company i work at, and i like using open ended questions

LeetCode problems are a small portion of technical interviews at any reasonable company, but it’s not the entirety of the interview.

Nobody I’ve ever interviewed with has used LeetCode style problems as the only factor. You need to create a hiring process that has a multi-faceted interview process and evaluates the person’s entire work history, abilities, and communication during the interview.

uhh..by not asking leetcode questions?

ask them to show their personal coding projects. people who grind leetcode have none. because leetcode eats up all their time.