A friend of mine wanted a job at a FAANG company. He knew there'd be first a leetcode interview, and complained that he'd have to spend 3 weeks studying for it. I said those three weeks would be the best investment he'd ever make.

So he did the three weeks, passed the leetcode, passed the interviews, and now makes 400k.

When I was 10 or 11, I asked my dad what MIT was looking for in a student application. He (an MIT alum) told me. I picked out the things I could do (being captain of the football team was never going to work for me), applied to MIT, and got rejected. But Caltech, Dartmouth and Johns Hopkins did admit me.

You do what you gotta do.

I'll never understand why proponents of the "grindset" mentality get into automation. If you want to grind for that kind of money just go into sales, it's way easier and they give you an office with a door.

I'm a terrible salesman, and besides, I just don't like doing it.

I wholeheartedly agree with this, and I always thought leetcode questions and tech interviewing in general was broken, but as a filter for unqualified candidates, they were pretty effective. Which really matters when you have hundreds of candidates to sift through.

The biggest problem, of course, is that they also filtered qualified candidates (I personally got filtered out multiple times and I'd like to believe I was qualified!) But it is an understandable compromise whenever there is an extreme asymmetry in the volume of candidates and volume of interviewers, and the fix for that is simple: you study for the test (as you pointed out.)

Note also that as grandparent comment indicates, this test is a necessary but not sufficient condition; it's just to get your foot in the door for a deeper evaluation.