You're kidding yourself if you think SF is a magical land where knowing to reverse a B Tree gets you promoted. Realistically managers promote people based on tenure, who they get along with, and what they ship. Being able to communicate and understand the problem space is way more valuable than some arbitrary technical "skill"
To be fair, if you are the engineer leading that project and it ships on time and on budget then you are still worthy of promotion. The product leaders who thought another chat app was a good idea are the ones who need a reckoning
My experience was with diffing London and Singapore. It wasn't like London was in any way magical, but there was a night and day difference in the quality of technical interviews.
In Singapore if you previously worked at Google you were golden even if you were a goddamn moron and technical tests were done incredibly badly or not at all. I could see why people didn't improve their technical skills and why expert beginners were omnipresent. Nobody was going to reward them for it.
In London that sort of thing exists too but companies that interview on merit rather than pedigree did at least exist and weren't extremely uncommon.
I have limited experience of SF but I expect it is more like London than Singapore.
I have been a persistent critic of leetcode since before it even had a name. My favored interview style has always been "give realistic tasks within reason".
Leetcode was common in Singapore, because if you google programmer questions that's what comes up.
