Comment by mjr00
> the point is to understand how the candidate thinks, communicates, and decomposes problems.
100% and it's a shame that over time this has become completely lost knowledge, on both sides of the interview table, and "leetcode" is now seen as an arbitrary rote memorization hurdle/hazing ritual that software engineers have to pass to enter a lucrative FAANG career. Interviewees grind problems until they've memorized every question in the FAANG interview bank, and FAANG interviewers will watch a candidate spit out regurgitated code on a whiteboard in silence, shrug, and say "yep, they used the optimal dynamic programming solution, they pass."
If somebody writes the optimal algorithm that should be a negative unless their resume indicates they are writing that algorithm often. The only reason you should know any algorithm well enough to get it right is if your job is implementing the optimal version for every single language. Of course nobody maintains one algorithm in many different languages/libraries (say libc++, python, rust, ada, java - each has different maintainers), so I can safely safe the number is zero who should be able to implement your cleaver algorithm. Now if your cleaver algorithm is in the language standard library (or other library they often use) that should be able to call/use it, though even then I expect them to look up the syntax in most languages.