Normal? Yes. Ok? That's kinda up to you. Being able to design a solution, get buy in from leadership, and most importantly execute a solution at the strategy l

Normal? Yes. Ok? That's kinda up to you. Being able to design a solution, get buy in from leadership, and most importantly execute a solution at the strategy level is a valuable skill. I think behavioral interviewing, where candidates are asked to describe an experience/situation/project similar to what they would end up doing in the role they are interviewing for, is a better assessment for those kind of skills than HackerRank. That doesn't mean you won't find companies using LeetCode/HackerRank-type coding tests even at higher levels, but like you mention you could always study for that. I've had friends do that successfully. I've gone engineer -> tech lead -> engineer -> manager / built a team -> program manager -> director / built a team -> project manager -> engineer. It doesn't take as long as you'd think to get back into the flow of coding full time. Also, the rate of technical change keeps increasing anyway, so everybody's kinda in the same boat from the perspective of keeping up to speed technically.