If you're a good middle aged engineer, you should have enough former coworkers happy to hire you that you don't need get on the leetcode treadmill.

This is such a funny thing to read, because I see new L6 and 7 tech managers hired (above me) all the time. They're often middle aged people with kids. They don't bemoan this stuff (and yes, while they have fewer of them, they still need to solve a whiteboard problem or two to get hired)

But you're seeing the outcome of a selection process. You might feel differently if you saw the top of the funnel.

In what way? If you mean that there might be management wizards who are just fantastic but we skip, perhaps. But that isn't the point I was making, just that despite what people think, these interviews don't actually filter out experienced people with families and kids. Those kinds of people get hired regularly.

Well you don't actually know that, because you don't know what the top of the funnel looks like.

Consider a world where every L6+ manager candidate has a family and kids. However, only 5% of these can make time to do the LC stuff (revising most likely if they've been managing for a while).

So your company will end up filtering out 95% of candidates immediately, but people in the company will say that there's no problem as all of the successful candidates have a family and kids, so it can't be biased.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of technical screening for managers, but I'm making the point that you can't look at the output of a funnel and conclude that everything's fine, you need to look at the complete funnel to understand this.