Reality

I have worked at Amazon as SDE 3 and a Bar Raiser (100+ interviews taken), and have ppl who work at others too, and this is from my experience. Being a FAANG SWE would mean you spend very little time coding, most of the time in design docs, design reviews, code reviews, Agile meetings, conferences, 1 on 1s etc. You are rewarded for being an active member of the community by doing everything else but code. And when you do code, you rarely care about performance, as those things are already taken care of by the frameworks, tools and other things in place. You mostly do scripting, or very small surgical change and release it with a lot of reviews, collaboration etc. Yes you will have impact of several millions of dollars but not through your coding prowess. If you are let go due to PIP or layoffs, you will suck even doing a basic tree traversal if you havent been practicing coding on the side. This is one of the reasons behind a lot of youtuber coming out of FAANG showing you how to code, but not having anything worthwhile to show what they have used the skill for. Very few good programmers come out of FAANG atleast at the lower levels, good programmers do go to FAANG to cash in though who are not made by FAANG. So if you are in FAANG, or aspiring to go into a FAANG, keep leetcoding or work on harder coding side projects like building language parsers, learning Rust and its memory management, building a small OS, a game that is memory efficient, etc,. Or else you will atrophize into no-one.