Someone is going to come and make the point that if you want to get a job at "Booble" then you gotta put in the hard work to get it because there's a million ot

Someone is going to come and make the point that if you want to get a job at "Booble" then you gotta put in the hard work to get it because there's a million other people that want that job ;) It's not black and white. I do think that as a tech lead you need to be able to demonstrate some technical skill in your day to day. You should be a pretty good coder. You should be a pretty good debugger. You don't need to be a competitive programmer which is what some coding problems are modeled after. You do need to know enough of your CS to recognize a pattern where there's theory that matters. You do need to be able to look up the relevant info/papers in that case and be able to understand them. There's also a plethora of other things you need to do as a lead that related to the engineering side of things. design and architecture. testing. CI/CD. requirement management. project management. people skills. Sort of reminds me of the joke where you take your car to the repair person because the engine is making noise. The guy listens to hit and hits a spot very hard with a hammer and the engine is running again. No noise. The bill says $100. So you ask him $100 for hitting a spot with a hammer? He's like $1 for hitting the spot with the hammer, $99 for knowing what spot to hit. Coding some dynamic programming algorithm on the fly in an interview is hitting the spot with a hammer really hard. Knowing what spot to hit is most of the what you care about in a good software engineer.