edit: I'm talking about large tech companies, not the startups blindly copying their policies with little thought or consideration.

edit: It is also very reasonable to study having done it myself and talked to people who have gotten into these companies. At 15 minutes a pop you can do 100+ leetcode questions a week. Spend a few months and you'll have studied almost every reasonable question. Most of them are repetitive patterns but around 5% have tricks you need to memorize. That covers 2-3 out of your 5 interviews. Behavioral you need to memorize around 5 questions that they'll basically give you ahead of time. System design is harder but there's videos for the 10 topics that will cover 90% of the potential questions.

By that logic, most people would have completed all 1500 LC's in 4 months.

Numbers say otherwise. Each medium difficulty problem takes an hour to solve, assuming you can come up with a non-brute-force solution. Most of them force you to lookup, understand and implement other people's ideas.

If you can do 3 problems a day, completely on your own without any lookup, you're doing good pace.

When someone comes in and bombs, that is at least valuable information: we don't want to work with this person. When someone comes in and seems smart and capable, but makes hardly any progress on the problem because it's obviously their first time on a whiteboard, it's just regrettable all around.

We're not selecting for preparedness. In fact, we try to select against it: interviewers take pride in designing twists that separate understanding from recall. If you seem to be recalling, we're supposed to pick a different question, or failing that, report a null signal. But we do need you to be prepared enough that your interview skills don't get in the way of your actual skills.

And you're missing what these tests are actually doing instead: Figuring out which people have already seen the problem at hand, and probably memorized all/some of it.

The problem is that these interviewers will not pass you if you don't solve the problem almost perfectly in an amount of time that is way too small for someone who has never seen it before.

To make matters worse, many of the solutions require some trick or mathematical trivia to get right. Does that really prove you know your Algos & DS?

That is literally my point. They are very much testing your ability to study for months on end. Study as in memorize. That is by design at this point and not a side-effect. If you aren't willing to show the ability to study successfully for months on end then they're not interested.

edit: Over the course of months of grinding leetcode you will see 99% of the problems they are going to ask. Then it's about memorizing the tricks and patterns.

edit2: And as I said below their recruiters are very open about what you need to do (grind leetcode) to succeed at the interview.

FAANG employers want innovators who think outside the box. You can't do that with sheer memorization. Nothing new would be developed if tech companies hired people who just worked with what they already knew.

There's a difference between software engineers and coders. If tech companies didn't want engineers, they would simply hire coders from a coding boot camp.

I think tech interviewing is somewhat similar: are you focused and dedicated enough to learn something arbitrary and produce code for it?

TIL I've been "hacking" all their "tests" :D acing them just by curiosity & interest in computers in general, a bit of intelligence and a lot of laziness!