A moderately smart person was selected for a good job perhaps over many many better possible hires simply because that person had the leisure to learn the game. Inefficient. But nice for that individual, naturally.

It’s like the bar exam for lawyers. It bears absolutely no relationship whatsoever to the actual job and the work you will be doing. It’s a pointless ritual. And the point of the above story is that the person performed the ritual and then promptly forgot all the words once they succeeded. It illustrates the pointlessness.

It took forever. Literally tens of thousands of dollars of opportunity cost, with a lot of risk of having nothing to show for it.

The bummer is that you're right, it actually is worth even this much investment, because these companies do pay extremely well. But it's still horrendously inefficient, because the companies are getting a very small improvement to their signal to noise ratio, at this great cost (which, notably, they don't bear).

"Seemingly smart person getting a good job" is a criteria for filling headcount during a boom, but regresses the industry's maturity by placing inexperienced people into critical roles.

The problem with this story is that people need to work with and rely on this person for responsibilities they're not yet qualified to meet. In some cases, a "smart person" will be able to grow into the role, but the road there is long and messy, which becomes a frustration for colleagues, supervisors, clients, users etc.

Because of the prolonged boom we just went through, the industry -- especially at FAANG's -- is now saturated with smart, naive people trying to fake it until they make it, leading to a gross decline in quality and consistency compared to where we have been and might otherwise be.

Apparently they expect people to work for free for more than a month to learn material they then won't use.

In my mind that's a rather nasty practice.

Not that I'm complaining. I'm happy to pick up people that are good at computers but wouldn't be able to pass that hurdle, and probably wouldn't hire anyone that has.

although its a different paradigm that I’m used to, I agree with this general concept

if you provide utility to the market, you shouldn’t need credentials or a corporate ladder to climb to prove it, it should be immediate compensation no matter how disparate

so despite how coveted tech compensation packages are at this tier of company, a seemingly smart person getting a good job after doing a contrived aptitude test does meet that criteria. other people outside the field (and within) have difficulty passing it and don't have the cognitive ability to study for it, or the financial stability to prioritize studying for it

I also agree that a less contrived aptitude test would be better

They passed over all the people who didn't study hard enough on random word problems, and then practice those types of problems sufficiently such they could hammer out a solution in under 20 minutes. Multiple aspects of the "leetcode interview" require practice outside of work experience for many people, despite them being great problem solvers.