Anyone can train and get good at it, it makes interviews short and not time consuming, it’s a standard accros industry so you can focus on studying it and not have to read one book for each company you apply to.
What would be a better alternative? Hiring based on connections? Take home assignments that takes 15 hours to complete? Domain specific knowledge grilling?
My biggest problems are getting requirements, understanding the problem, working around a legacy system or deciphering old code, not actually writing code when requirements and documentation is on point.
If you really valued your time you would spend a week studying for the interview that gives you a 50pct or more increase in salary so you can work that many fewer years
With that said I agree on your other point, putting in the work and sacrificing time, even months, will pay dividends long-term with a salary that allows someone to retire early.
Hearing some people, you'd think they ask you to memorize chess openings or something.
Most Leetcode Mediums fall into the category where the type of solution is obvious (sliding window/graph search/etc), and the code isn't hard to write, but there's a "trick" embedded in the problem and if you don't already know the trick, you're never going to figure it out in 30 minutes.
So the best strategy is to find a "Top N Leetcodes" list like Blind 75 and just memorize them. Of course you can't expect those exact questions to come up in every interview, but having a few dozen solutions already memorized should let you do some pattern recognition and lower your cognitive load while you're trying to figure out what that problem's trick is.
I am sorry to say, this is just not true.
> but having a few dozen solutions already memorized should let you do some pattern recognition
Chess opening memorization is pure "remember the moves, play the moves" that's it. No thinking or pattern recognition involved.
If this is about being able to solve problems by generalizing from having seen a few dozen solutions, then I don't think "memorizing" is the appropriate term here, at all.
You know you live in a clown world when memorizing nonsense makes one more employable than learning some front-end stuff to be a little more full-stacky.
Why would you not do this? If I’m hiring for a specific role, I want to make sure they are good at that role. Doubly so if their resume states they’re an expert at something - let’s find out.
This doesn’t need to be hostile or one-upping, but to prove someone’s actual depth of knowledge in an area they claim to have expertise in.