Unfortunately the CS trivia is necessary. In a previous job I interviewed people who snuck past the phone screen and would have wasted a ton of interviewer time if some CS-101 questions hadn't exposed near total ignorance of the highlights on their resume. My favorite was the guy who applied for a job as an air traffic routing researcher and after 20 minutes of computational geometry questions said, "Wow, tough, do you do a lot of math here?" Yeah dude. This is NASA. We do a lot of math here.

> Unfortunately the CS trivia is necessary.

No, it isn't.

If you interview at NASA, the CS questions being asked better damn well not be trivia.

The first few are. If you can't pass them, you don't get to waste anybody else's time.

Worth going through a couple hours of that for the 150k prize at the end?

Not really, no. I have a better "prize" at my current employer, and I didn't have to go through that hazing ritual to get here. I'm not working on toy webapp garbage for social media, ads or the like, either. Even if that weren't the case my answer would remain the same: encouraging juvenile hazing ritual nonsense is not something I care to do.

Also, it takes a lot of time and effort outside of work to keep that undergrad CS trivia readily available for discussion in an interview. So it's not just "a couple of hours."

I’m not sure what you’re unhappy about. You’re fulfilled at your current job, not looking for a new one where this kind of interviewing happens, so what’s the problem at hand?

What I remember seeing on hacker news is people blogging about spending three to six months of their free time making sure they can answer every single question on leetcode, that's a lot different from a one time, one day interview.