Here’s the thing: patterns you will spot doing Leetcode problems are almost useless for anything else. The only purpose for working enough problems to see those patterns is to have more successful interviews.
I personally think we'd be better off if there was more focus on these puzzles and less focus on 'cultural fit' - but that's just me.
If nothing else, interviewing is an important part of your working life. To get a competitive job, you are probably going to have to practice something. I personally can get a lot more excited about competing on puzzle solving abilities than competing on social skills or social protocols, even if those puzzles might not be used very often once I'm at work.
(I'm not saying algorithms are completely unrelated to the work we do- I'm saying that even if they were, i'd still prefer to be tested on puzzles than to be tested on social skills)
I mean, the subtext here is that we're all getting interviewed for jobs we don't know how to do. All companies have their own infrastructure and their own way of doing things; you can't hire people with experience on that companies codebase unless you want to limit yourself to ex-employees. So all companies are interviewing to try to figure out who could learn how to do the job in question, and that's... pretty difficult to do.
But one interesting side effect of the interview process is that everybody at a place like Google or Facebook or Amazon has a non-trivial understanding of efficiency.
