Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Kids just stay at home grinding LC all day Those kids should start their own unicorns instead of grinding LC all day. That would be a much better use of their intelligence.
After spending years grinding LeetCode... 1) they will join Meta and be a cannon fodder developer for a PHP coder that never excelled at those puzzles, Mark Zuckerberg. 2) a Github Copilot user will wipe the floor with them. Being good at LeetCode puzzles will be as practical as being able to mentally calculate square roots. Just a party trick for low rating TV shows.
When I joined CS degree I also thought like you did.
Now looking at insane competition, the kids who can't write a real program if their life depends upon it, constantly getting better internship and job offers than me, I believe I was wrong.
No one cares.
People who interview are also likely Leetcode kids. So they will ask some obscure question from 14th page of Leetcode to flex, so the probability of passing is almost proportional to amount of time you grind.
If I have a chance to go back to year 1, I focus on Leetcode. Fundamentals be damned.
In this industry no one has an incentive to care about efficiency. If they did, we wouldn't be gambling with right candidate answering an obscuring question from some 10+ page of Leetcode or Hackerrank.
Now someone from outside India can reply to this with their usual justifications. To be clear, I don't hate DSA questions. Just pointing out as your leetcodes get harder, you tend to select people who do leetcode whole day than those who are good at DSA and also good at programming.
Edit: and yes, "if you're good at DSA you should be able to answer the obscure question". Dude obscure question will be LC hard or upper end of medium. The kid who does Leetcode 3 hours a day already seen the question and remembers the answer too, and there are n > 10 kids like that.