At some point the metric becomes the goal itself. Ie. Leetcode style programing is/was used to filter out engineers that couldn't program. And the problems th

At some point the metric becomes the goal itself. Ie. Leetcode style programing is/was used to filter out engineers that couldn't program. And the problems themselves were relatively easy, reverse a tree, build and LRU (which is not trivial at all). But then there is an army of prep information, and people are just optimizing for Leetcode style programing. Then companies have to raise the bar again, and keep asking even harder questions. ie. build LRU from scratch was considered hard, now it is just a 'medium' level. It has taken to stupid levels, where it is not anymore a metric of 'is this person a good engineer', but more of a 'how much this person did prep'. i.e. it becomes a measure of effort and desperation, and not just sheer ability. That's why you see so many stories, of engineers preping for leetcode only, getting in, and not being able to do their job and getting piped.... Also, personally, the best thing that I did to make me a better engineer was creating an app, a backend, and full service, with paying customers. That taught me much much more than spending months on leetcode ever did. Brushing up some CS concepts and Data Structures, and some coding, does help you to become a better engineer. But doing just that, it doesn't make you a truly useful engineer at all.