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That time investment sounds like a tragic loss of open source development and random curious exploration by students.

Maybe also quite a few lost innovative startups, which might've been spun out of students making things they want to make, rather than grinding just to prepare for interview rituals.

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It can be a massive fun too. Ive never interviewed at FAANG, but solving some leetcode problems (mostly medium-hard though) was so cool for me and some of my friends. We were into olympic math at school, and I don't consider that a waste of time as well.

Good point. Practicing those exercises for sports-like competitions sounds great for people who want to do that for its own sake.

But there seems to be a large societal opportunity cost to everyone spending several months practicing doing that on a whiteboard, specifically for job interviews.

It's fun but for the most part boils down to software trivia, similar to Quiz Bowl. The key to succeeding with leetcode on the harder questions is memorization of things that frankly anyone can google up pretty quickly. It's a poor reflection of actual work.

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