Yes, there are degrees of hardness with competitive programming being the very tip top and FAANG interviews (googles especially) being not so far behind. Think of it like this, in competitive programming is S-tier. Faang interviews are A-tier.
The job only requires C-tier. Just know you basic DFS, BFS, recursion, heaps and all that stuff and how to look shit up when needed is C-tier.
Look, the above is just my opinion against yours, but what do the metrics say?
Googles acceptance rate is less than harvard. That's like less then 1%. There's two conclusions you can draw from that metric:
Conclusion 1: Only 1% of people who applied are able to work at google.
Conclusion 2: The google filter is extreme and filtering way beyond people who are just capable of working for google.
Google even admits this. They bias the interviews to be hard to get rid of false positives who can potentially make it through slightly easier interviews. As a result they end up creating a lot of false negatives...
That's the narrative google makes up to excuse their less than 1% acceptance rate. Makes them seem less seem less elitist. But to crank up the hardness of the interview to less than 1% for this excuse? That's a little extreme. If the acceptance rate was 20% sure... but not less than 1%. They're asking me to believe a reality where there's so many potential false positives that they have to crank up the difficulty to a 1% acceptance rate? LOL.
It's BS. But either way. Google needs to filter somehow as they can't have everyone working for them. There's not enough money or space for everyone who applies. The question is whether algorithms are the best filter? My argument is no, it is not. Rejecting the creator of brew (and on the facebook side, the creator of hadoop) for example is the kind of stupidity that comes from religiously worshipping algorithms as the one true indicator of programmer skill.