>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.

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.

I feel like that selects against innovative people. Memorizing problems that have already been solved is basically the definition of re-inventing the wheel.

I'd argue that memorizing solutions is the exact opposite of reinventing the wheel. You implement an existing tried and true approach rather than trying to come up with a clever solution yourself. Most of the work at large tech companies isn't innovative but rather it's tedious work that has to be done to high standards with verbose documentation. This seems to select the right people for that. Remember that selecting against doesn't mean excluding. Enough innovative people will get in to keep pushing things forward.

You couldn't be more wrong. Memorization is one of the lowest forms of intelligence. Just because you can spit out a DFS algorithm, it doesn't mean you understand why and how it works.

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.