[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.