You're making a few (reasonable) assumptions based on the base rate of engineering interviewing practices in the industry. I'm not using Leetcode though a coding problem is part of our onsite process. My first screen is mostly a series of knowledge questions and asking candidates to explain projects they built on their resumes. Most candidates cannot do this. They fail to explain their own projects and fail to explain foundational concepts of distributed systems.

As an interviewer I need to be able to challenge candidates to get adequate signal to make an informed selection. My pool is computer science graduates and experienced software engineers. Most candidates fail. I haven't analyzed the distribution but my best guess is that over half of the successful candidates are on work visas.

As someone who was out of work for a large portion of 2025 and attended many interviews, I found interviewing frustrating and failed many. Only after taking a couple of months sitting down and studying fundamentals, grinding leetcode, reading the latest distributed systems literature, and practicing interviewing, I discovered that I genuinely had knowledge and skill gaps. The studying actually helped me become a better engineer. I received several offers after this intensive study period.

I wanted to make a separate comment to respond to the sampling bias question. From discussions with colleagues and analysis of companies, there is a large overhang of credentialed yet low-capability engineers in many high-population countries. For example, the top Indian and Chinese companies offer comparable salaries to the US-owned multinationals resident in their countries. These are outliers.

The vast majority of candidates for Flipcart and Bytedance simply would never be able to perform adequately. These top companies pay extraordinarily highly compared to most software engineering firms in their countries, far beyond the delta between OpenAI and a typical software engineer in the United States. The quality gradient is still there. Flipcart and Bytedance need to compete internationally, so their salaries are pulled upwards substantially.

I see a lot of Polish names in those coding websites leaderboards. It seems to be working, Polish tech industry is growing, as is India's and China's. Idk, grinding seems to work if that's your issue.

So? At least they're grinding, and we as a nation used to have that American grit. Now everyone just sits on their asses and cry "unfair" when someone willing to grind gets better opportunities.

Our discipline fundamentally seeks to remove “grind”. You’re missing the point.