At a certain point companies prefer employees who can memorize lots of trivial information and perform at a high level while being constantly monitored for adequate performance. Leetcode pop quizzes are excellent tests for this within an hour: POSIWID.[0] Should you work at these companies? Is this kind of employee optimal for company performance at an any given company size? I don’t have these answers.
My POSIWID guess is reducing market liquidity and dev pay by reducing competition for staff. These companies have been caught for it before. Even though I was pretty close in getting these processes reformed at my previous big tech company and nobody hinted at that.
At this point I think it's a self perpetuating system, like medical residency sleep deprivation or 'accrediation', which incidentally makes changing hospitals a 6 month BS process for any doctor.
A certain segment of engineers voraciously and autistically defend the leetcode interview since they were selected by it and probably like competitive coding and they are exhausting to deal with. The sane reformers eventually give up and leave them to their empire of dirt since nobody gets promoted for changing these things in big tech companies.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...