It's because the business people got interested and are increasingly taking leadership roles. As an engineer who has shifted over to the product management side I can safely say business people suck fun out of stuff for a living. Margins, cost savings, metrics to manage, each and every slow step of creating a new, less fun, normal erodes a culture built on making "Something cool" or "Just for fun".
Worse yet is when the business minded masquerade "Fun" activities as them still being cool such as hackathons. The sad truth of the matter is that this is what happens in a maturing industry. A lot of the green field money that sat around for Facebook and Google to gobble up has been eaten. The remaining scraps are enough to prop up small startups, but really only until they get absorbed into the giants with fat checks for the founders. The regular workers get conformed into the system, with assurances "Everything will totally stay the same" as they slowly change everything.
Businesses exist to make people money. Engineers are great at solving problems and innovating. Business people are great at squeezing every last drop from those solutions till only a husk remains. To be fair to the business people, myself included, if you do anything less than squeeze for money as hard as you can, you get beat out by the competition who copy you, and nothing is as not fun as being jobless. The more and more people who get coding knowledge the more and more being a coder will be just like every other engineering position. Someone who executes. Which is why I bailed and got into PM so I could actually have a strong say to the business in what we execute on.
To end on a happy note I have never seen more people getting into robotics clubs, trying to make small static sites, learning the basics, and I am certain that every day more and more people are running their first hello world programs. So I think there some ups and downs to everyone learning coding.
Agile/Scrum was the biggest bait-and-switch con out there - developers thinking the methodologies would empower them while in fact being a vector for the worst excesses of micromanagement. I feel less empowered now than I did in my earliest days as a junior dev.
Whats driving business types to think leetcode is a good test? This should be an easy conversation with HR. I think software engineers want this arbitrary barrier.
Honestly this is probably because other businesses started doing it. When businesses have no clue they look to the market for the "standard" way of doing things. We don't make mechanical engineers design mechanical solutions for fun.It is just a consequence of the early culture of "hackers" and people who do that stuff for fun and for work. Hopefully dies over time, but it is unlikely given that now seems like the standard thing to do. Businesses are not rational thinking creatures. They just do what feels like lower risk if they can.
Leetcoding involves preparation for known problems and churning out solutions in least possible time. Most of the business have problems along the same lines (think of CRUD, authentication, authorization, UI animations etc ...) and they think people who excel in the former might do well in latter.
Worse yet is when the business minded masquerade "Fun" activities as them still being cool such as hackathons. The sad truth of the matter is that this is what happens in a maturing industry. A lot of the green field money that sat around for Facebook and Google to gobble up has been eaten. The remaining scraps are enough to prop up small startups, but really only until they get absorbed into the giants with fat checks for the founders. The regular workers get conformed into the system, with assurances "Everything will totally stay the same" as they slowly change everything.
Businesses exist to make people money. Engineers are great at solving problems and innovating. Business people are great at squeezing every last drop from those solutions till only a husk remains. To be fair to the business people, myself included, if you do anything less than squeeze for money as hard as you can, you get beat out by the competition who copy you, and nothing is as not fun as being jobless. The more and more people who get coding knowledge the more and more being a coder will be just like every other engineering position. Someone who executes. Which is why I bailed and got into PM so I could actually have a strong say to the business in what we execute on.
To end on a happy note I have never seen more people getting into robotics clubs, trying to make small static sites, learning the basics, and I am certain that every day more and more people are running their first hello world programs. So I think there some ups and downs to everyone learning coding.