Not every great engineer can be good at this stuff to do well in international level competitions, by definition that's a very small group.
I assume you're not on the same level as William Lin or tourist, so it would be like them wondering why you struggle on a particular problem when they can do every one easily.
> I assume you're not on the same level as William Lin or tourist, so it would be like them wondering why you struggle on a particular problem when they can do every one easily.
Those have spent more than 10x as much time as me on that though. I got to my level in about 6 months that I spent to pivot from math to programming, that isn't unreasonable effort for anyone, most computer science grads have spent more time learning algorithms than I had.
If you had realized that
* in 90+% of job openings, whiteboard leetcode interviews optimize for the wrong thing, and neither the candidate nor the interviewer should be honored for its inclusion in the process
* live coding exercises are just as much an exercise in psychology - your willingness to submit to unreasonable demands and their willingness to subject you to them
* negative discrimination (i.e. weed out requirements) create biases in your hiring process and ultimately skill gaps in your personnel base
You would potentially be self-aware enough not to post this cavalier and self-aggrandizing comment.
My Google interviews was basically me coding up a solution in 10 minutes and explaining what I did and proving it works with runtime etc. Then we spent the rest of the time talking about engineering problems, testing, what I did at previous jobs etc. I am rustier now many years later, but It is still good enough that I don't fail, it might take 20 minutes instead of 10 but there is still room to spare. So the limit is that you are maybe half as fast as I am when I'm rusty, doesn't seem like an overly high bar to me.