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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.

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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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