Is something wrong with software engineering interviews that one could reasonably need to spend months prepping for interviews? Leetcode problems can be fun and interesting, but seldom represent problems and skills I employ daily as a more senior software engineer. Studying these problems won’t help me much at my current employer and likely wouldn’t after I passed the interview gauntlet at another firm.
There are plenty of passionate software engineers who think those problems are actually fun. Independently of that (I don't think it's an immediate red flag if those problems are not fun for you, or not fun for you in that specific setting etc.), a lot of it is actually a glimpse into how working with that person might be. I.e. what ideas do they form, how do they communicate them, how do they respond to feedback, ho…
I've mostly seen them in my hobby gamedev work where things like concurrency and graphs and dynamism are endemic.
That's why leetcode filters really miss the mark because they usually don't fit the job description. They're just a lazy way to test searchable knowledge in an arbitrarily constrained setting.
What we really should be evaluating, as a profession, is reasoning and software design, scoped to the desired competency of the role.
Enjoyment is a side effect of that.