Here's my opinion as a well paid west-coast software engineer. Leetcode is literally gatekeeping to boost the egos of people whose entire identity is that they

Here's my opinion as a well paid west-coast software engineer. Leetcode is literally gatekeeping to boost the egos of people whose entire identity is that they work at a FAANG. You have probably met such people - I remember these types from high school and college who could memorize a bunch of shit and regurgitate it. Beyond that, I've found maybe 25% of them are good team mates/leaders. They go home, update their bios to read "Stanford CS, Ex-Apple, ex-Meta, now Noogler", and hang out with other similar types. I've been on interview panels before, and while I prefer administrating the systems design interview, I've also had to administer coding. The way it goes is like this - half have this stuff memorized because they took a FAANG interviewing bootcamp or spent 6 hours a day for 3 months grinding leetcode. The other half are split into another half - one half that struggles but manages to do decently with guidance, and another half that just fails outright due to nerves, lack of knowledge, etc. Here's the weird, anecdotal experience though - of the people who absolutely kill the coding interviews, maybe half will do well in systems design. They struggle at explaining concepts on the fly, or cannot come up with reasonable solutions. Maybe it is a lack of imagination, because I really do think a lot of people just memorize and get ahead. Then they hit a ceiling, or fly just at the max ceiling while boasting "ex-Facebook, ex-Apple, etc."