I've never seen her spend more than a day or two preparing for an interview. And she gets paid near the top of her position, and has worked on dozens of multi-million dollar proposals.

The only reason it takes her a while to find a job is there's not a ton of positions that are willing to pay her what she's worth now (she's gone through job interview processes only to be given an offer half of the bottom of the range she provided multiple times), and she usually has to try to sell them on what she can provide to the team that they weren't even looking for (but should have been). Doesn't always work, obviously. Budgets aren't always there.

Meanwhile I've spend 2+ weeks or more preparing (hours each day) for SV interviews and still failed them. In Facebook's case, I was asked three questions by an HR person and gave the right answer to the third question, just not the term they must have had written down for them on the paper, was told I was wrong, and then got a rejection email. At Zynga I was asked to come up with and speak the code to a permutation algorithm, over the phone, on the spot, without using a computer. At Google, in one of the six interviews, I was asked how to convert a 3D grid of buildings into a 2D skyline with a single line, and I had difficulty figuring out the logic for overlapping buildings in less than 30 minutes using only a whiteboard.

I always spend at least 2-4 weeks refreshing algorithms and technical trivia questions before I even start looking for a job in tech.

Not a developer (though was an engineer) but I've never studied for an interview beyond maybe spending an evening reading up on a company. But, to be honest, the (few) jobs I've had over the past 20 years or so have always come through knowing people.