[lazyllama]

I used to be like you. I stay on top of cpp con talks, I read Meyers and Andrescu's books and I had some fun side projects and I do fine at work, regular promotions, etc, but I did incredibly badly during interviews. I wasn't sure if it's some kind of IQ thing because I know people who can answer those CS questions without studying but I took the advice of some friends and I spent months grinding leetcode style questions. After a while something in my brain clicked and since then I've gotten a ton of job offers and worked at two FAANGs.

[jvanderbot]

That "Something" is usually problem decomposition. Programming is very much a game of slicing a big problem into solve-able smaller problems, and leetcode is usually just a one-to-one mapping of description to some polynomial time algorithm from a textbook.

It's a game of quick matching (what polynomial time alg comes close to solving this), then quick coding (how do I translate the input to something that alg can solve). Do that over and over and you're an excellent interviewee.

[airbreather]

System and sub-system decomposition is the "black art" IMO that can have so much impact, but be so hard to teach or even evaluate for optimal choices.

When I was a boy, practitioners of such things were called Systems Analysts, and may well have never coded.