[lisper]

Social signaling is too important not to engage in "nonsense" on occasion. Geeks resist this, thinking that their special flavor of technical knowledge, which they alone possess, should transcend a million years of evolution that produced monkeysphere dynamics. The situation is laden with all manner of irony.

[sneak]

This is a straw man: choosing not to work for fools is not opting out of social signaling.

If you know how to program, you have lots of options.

[lisper]

> choosing not to work for fools is not opting out of social signaling.

That depends entirely on how you choose to define "fools".

[filoleg]

Agreed. I am quite ok with being a "fool", if it means working for a FAANG tier company and collecting FAANG tier compensation.

I am not going to disadvantage myself by refusing to participate in this on some questionable principle. While I agree that Leetcode-style interviews are not the overall best, I am yet to come up with an alternative that addresses all those issues without introducing massive new ones. So it is a compromise. And as long as this compromise stands, I am fully intending on getting the most out of it.