This article speaks to me

> The Leetcode interview they foist onto candidates is completely unnecessary and is, I believe, a major driver behind the rot that they are experiencing. Even worse than a company's obnoxious gatekeeping chickens come home to roost.. Think of the last ~20 years of so many CS undergrads spending discretionary time training for "the coding interview". To the exclusion of building/exploring things that they want to make or are interested in. So much shared zany student projects, open source, startups, piqued research interests, and personal enrichment that didn't happen.

Hard agree on the interview focus. I think Google's interview culture has optimized heavily for missing forest for the trees, where the person will be extremely good at solving hard but well defined problems. But general customer empathy, releasing things that matter, long term maintenance are not favoured at all. I never worked at Google. But had a senior product manager who joined a startup where I worked. We were building an SMB focussed product for developing world. At one point of time a pissed off customer was on the call and the account manager begged the xoogler to join the call. The guy was astonished at the suggestion and blurted out that "we don't talk with customers, we build". The product doomed, I moved on. But that one incidence has had lasting impression on me.