The biggest obstacle, at least in my experience, is actually getting that interview. In ten years of writing software, I've had a handful of emails/messages fr

The biggest obstacle, at least in my experience, is actually getting that interview. In ten years of writing software, I've had a handful of emails/messages from FAANG recruiters, and they've never ended up in an actual interview. I won't name names, but I was offered an interview and we agreed a three week timeframe to prepare for the phone screen, but that screen never came. In another 6-12 months I might be lucky enough to get an email from someone else, but unless I spend my entire life on Leetcode to prepare for an email that "might" come it's likely that I'd fail it anyway. Let's also not pretend that these interviews are easy. If we assume that FAANG interviews are around Leetcode medium to hard level, it still takes a significant amount of ability to do well, even if you can write a Max Heap from scratch and can traverse a BST. Even if you're had time to warm up for these interviews, you can come across a hard problem that rules you out for that company.