I do find it a little ironic that as an industry we started doing these interviews as a "least common denominator" - from senior engineers to fresh college grads, everyone occasionally needs to do a search or a sort or a lookup table, and people should recognize when "loop in a loop" n^2 solutions aren't ideal.
And we tuned it from there to into its own sort of mini-SAT with an accompanying preparatory industry and culture.
I find it as a reminder of my fungibility as an engineer: I get paid absurd sums because of supply and demand, not because of my skills; anybody who can game the leetcode exam (and the architectural diagram quiz and the personality quiz) can walk in and take the same 300k income I have. If enough people do so, wages could be pushed down by employers.
Thankfully for my mortgage, that hasn't happened yet and probably won't happen soon.
And we tuned it from there to into its own sort of mini-SAT with an accompanying preparatory industry and culture.
I find it as a reminder of my fungibility as an engineer: I get paid absurd sums because of supply and demand, not because of my skills; anybody who can game the leetcode exam (and the architectural diagram quiz and the personality quiz) can walk in and take the same 300k income I have. If enough people do so, wages could be pushed down by employers.
Thankfully for my mortgage, that hasn't happened yet and probably won't happen soon.