I see where you're coming from but I disagree. your posts assumes that people who are good at leetcode (or more accurately, get good at leetcode by spending time on it) are not creative. but I'd like to point out that creativity isn't an intrinsic ability, but largely a skill. you get more creative the more you practice. innovation is not just about thinking differently for the sake of it, but more about the cross-pollination of ideas from different domains. that's what mathematicians do a lot of the time- see what unsolved puzzle can be re-shaped to be like a solved puzzle, and that's what a good computer scientist should be able to do with tech. i belive, at the same time, that leetcode is pretty fucking useless as a measure of ability and a way of learning new algos because. my opinion on the matter is that big tech like Google and fb suck because each manager has to justify their bullshit job by doing some bullshit change. there's no coherent vision anymore and the company has fragmented into a thousand teams, each run like a bad startup with infinite funding just until the boss gets a promotion or smth. and then the team does some other bullshit changes. apple has always had a very coherent product vision, and so this doesn't happen. i belive my conjecture is simpler and more plausible than saying that people who work hard aren't creative.