I get it from ~15 years experience as a manager across many engineering teams in large ecommerce companies. I’ve seen it literally hundreds of times. Someone ab

I get it from ~15 years experience as a manager across many engineering teams in large ecommerce companies. I’ve seen it literally hundreds of times. Someone absolutely aces leetcode interviews and appears to walk on water with instant solutions to non-cookie-cutter dynamic programming problems, exotic tree / heap / graph data structure problems, word problems that are hard to map to data structure problems. They join with a big offer and it goes nowhere. They don’t know how to choose simpler methods, do things a bad fast way, be incremental, follow evidence from quick user feedback and only optimize when you really have to. Their output is poor, but because they see themselves as high status due to leetcode superiority, it just becomes a problem for everyone. Eventually they think the issue isn’t their poor output but rather some ceiling they are limited by and they quit. Meanwhile plenty of other people do terribly badly at the dynamic programming / data structure trivia, but they are great at the actual job. They work incrementally, they are less prone to over-engineering or premature optimizations, they focus on the business impact, all while still writing clean, simple code and carefully picking their battles in terms of significant data structure work or optimizations. The sheer randomness of outcomes leads to leetcode performance just being totally uncorrelated with success in the role as defined by any measure of business impact or effectiveness.