This is correct. Once you have an industry built around prepping for a test, interview, whatever, the candidates that you end up hiring are those that optimized

This is correct. Once you have an industry built around prepping for a test, interview, whatever, the candidates that you end up hiring are those that optimized for the interview. At that point you better be damn sure that interview process is the very best predictor of success for the actual work you need done. Otherwise you end up with a whole lot of the wrong people, who as you put it, can collect a paycheck to get ready for the next round of interviews. I think what would work better is to get away from leetcode and do more internally developed design and coding exercises that are representations of the kind of things you’d see at that company. Yeah for FAANG type companies who are hiring thousands of engineers per year, maybe you need the leetcode style standardization in order to scale. But for everyone else that cargo culted these processes and doesn’t need to hire 5 engineers per day, it’d be great to step back and actually consider what you want to evaluate for.