The latest articles on DEV Community by Ananya Teepireddy (@ananya_16cc161851f1823987). https://dev.to/ananya_16cc161851f1823987 https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F3967405%2Fce59a2e3-2313-4df8-af08-70c4c8346f62.png https://dev.to/ananya_16cc161851f1823987 en Ananya Teepireddy Thu, 04 Jun 2026 03:38:50 +0000 https://dev.to/ananya_16cc161851f1823987/more-than-leetcode-3730 https://dev.to/ananya_16cc161851f1823987/more-than-leetcode-3730 <p>As a third year student attending multiple internship drives and interviews, I started doubting my own worth ,is it all really confined to DSA? Does the entire tech industry orbit around it?</p> <p>We live in an age where AI has made coding more accessible than ever, yet the curriculum and selection criteria still always leads back to the same thing. Typing out long code is no longer the real challenge, it's available at a click. What actually matters is the knowledge, the architectures, the ability to innovate. But none of that seems to count.</p> <p>Every round, every interview ,it's DSA. Meanwhile, the actual builders, the people who genuinely enjoy creating things and pushing ideas forward, rarely end up with the opportunities they deserve.</p> <p>It's become a rat race. People grinding thousands of DSA problems ,for what? When the answers are already out there, is this process really refining students or just exposing a deep loophole in how the industry hires?</p> <h2> The Moment It Hit Me </h2> <p>Every company I attended followed the same pattern. DSA in the first round, more complex DSA in the second, and then an interview that circled back to DSA again. At some point you have to ask, do companies actually want talent or just someone who can do what AI already does a thousand times better?</p> <p>Rejection is never easy. But what makes it harder is knowing you are genuinely passionate, you understand how things are built, you know the fundamentals and none of it counts. Meanwhile the ones who get selected are often those who blindly copy projects from GitHub and grind LeetCode day and night without understanding a single thing they have built.</p> <p>Companies ask for your LeetCode profile link. That is it. Not your domain knowledge, not your mindset, not your passion for the field. Just your ranking. Your CGPA defines your worth. Your LeetCode score defines your entire trajectory.</p> <p>It is exhausting. Showing up to round after round, knowing exactly how it is going to go, and still questioning whether you are enough.</p> <h2> We Are Building Employees Not Innovators </h2> <p>Companies should be looking for curiosity. For people who think beyond the obvious, who understand systems, who ask questions nobody else is asking. But when everything is carved out around DSA, nobody wants to go beyond anymore. The curiosity is stripped away. The creative instinct is dead. Innovation is at zero.</p> <p>Do companies want someone who can just ace a DSA round or someone who will actually push their product forward? Because those are two people cut from different cloth.</p> <p>It feels like recruiting has not evolved at all. The process works the same way it did ten to fifteen years ago, even though the industry around it has changed completely. There is more innovation happening than ever but somehow we are producing more consumers than creators. More employees than founders.</p> <p>And that is the elephant in the room nobody wants to address. You cannot build something great with just DSA. You may become a someone who clocks in and clocks out, But you will never become the person who builds something from scratch,who bets on themselves, who changes the game. DSA does not make founders. Curiosity does.</p> <h2> The Talent Was Always There </h2> <p>What we all need to realise is that there is an generation of talent being overlooked .The moment you remove DSA as the only filter, you will find candidates with potential that never showed up on a LeetCode leaderboard.</p> <p>CGPA tags and coding scores were never meant to define a person's entire worth. Hiring for passion over pattern moves the needle in ways no algorithm can measure. It is not just students who are losing here. Companies are quietly missing out on some of the best talent at the exact stage where innovation matters the most.</p> <p>And that is the cost nobody is calculating. Not because talent is scarce but because the system keeps filtering it out before it even gets a chance. It is a never ending cycle that is slowly rotting the potential of an entire generation of students, boxing them into a single metric, limiting everything they could be to just how well they can solve a problem that an AI can already solve in seconds.</p> <p>The talent is there. It always was. The criteria just needs to catch up.</p> <p>This article was originally published at <a href="https://dev.tourl">morethanleetcode.hashnode.dev</a></p> techtalks studentlife dsa innovation