I've been programming for 10 years and I'm pretty good at it, at every job I've had I get lots of praise and recognition and accelerated promotions. But I have a hard time with leetcode problems and have failed several interviews because of them. It's not that I can't learn the leetcode tricks, it's that I don't have the motivation or the time to drill for months on them so that I can retain all the tricks.

I don't have a CS degree so I think that might be the difference, I didn't get to spend four years thinking about algorithms and data structures. Leetcode interviews are a form of gatekeeping that CS degree people use to filter out non-CS people.