Edit: And I think that you'll find that most leetcode problems are pretty easy if you are an expert at doing loops and recursions.

> I'm not saying you'll never have to do it, but it's going to typically be a small proportion of your day job, so why test this stuff so much at interview stage?

It isn't a small portion of your time spent at Google at least. Almost no engineers at Google ever talks to non technical people, product managers or engineering managers does that. Most engineers works to reduce cpu usage of backend servers or build scalable features for backend servers or similar stuff. Even high level decisions like deciding what service to use requires more engineering hours in time spent refactoring the thing than engineering hours spent deciding what to use, so there is much greater need for people who can code than people who can make decisions.

And if you argue that Google is bad at making new good products, that isn't the fault of their software engineers since they don't decide what to build. Instead it is the fault of VP's, and those don't do white boarding interviews.