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The Leader of the LeetCode Rebellion: An Interview with Roy Lee

Student entrepreneur uses AI to beat Amazon interviews By Nicolas Casey On March 3rd, Roy Lee got an email from Columbia University. Figuring it was just another college newsletter, Roy, the creator of Interview Coder, was shocked at what he saw when he opened the latest message in his inbox.

The Columbia College sophomore spoke with The Pennsylvania Post about the saga that has catapulted him to virality on X, caught the attention of the global media spanning from the Hindustan Times to CNBC, and raised vital questions about the viability of current paradigms surrounding digital assessments and formal education. Leveraging this technology and the concepts he was learning in computer science courses, Roy set out to demonstrate this point, publishing a video of how he used Interview Coder to get a summer internship offer from Amazon at their headquarters in Seattle. Similarly, he is adamant in his belief that his creation and usage of Interview Coder were not malicious and constitute a protest, which he views as being “shut down and silenced by incumbents.” To that end, Roy sent an email to Amazon onboarding denying their offer of employment two days prior to uploading his YouTube video.

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