[jjav]

> you've already passed a pretty high bar to become a SWE

The problem with the algorithm/leetcode style is that you can run it at a very high bar and you end up selecting people extremely skilled at that one thing, but which has very little to none correlation with shipping reliable & maintainable production code.

I've never needed to hire (and surely never will) people who can reverse binary trees with a hand tied behind their back, so that style of interview is not a meaningful signal.