More Than LeetCode

As a third year student attending multiple internship drives and interviews, I started doubting my own worth ,is it all really confined to DSA? Does the entire tech industry orbit around it? We live in an age where AI has made coding more accessible than ever, yet the curriculum and selection criteria still always leads back to the same thing. Typing out long code is no longer the real challenge, it's available at a click. What actually matters is the knowledge, the architectures, the ability to innovate. But none of that seems to count. Every round, every interview ,it's DSA. Meanwhile, the actual builders, the people who genuinely enjoy creating things and pushing ideas forward, rarely end up with the opportunities they deserve. It's become a rat race. People grinding thousands of DSA problems ,for what? When the answers are already out there, is this process really refining students or just exposing a deep loophole in how the industry hires? The Moment It Hit Me Every company I attended followed the same pattern. DSA in the first round, more complex DSA in the second, and then an interview that circled back to DSA again. At some point you have to ask, do companies actually want talent or just someone who can do what AI already does a thousand times better? Rejection is never easy. But what makes it harder is knowing you are genuinely passionate, you understand how things are built, you know the fundamentals and none of it counts. Meanwhile the ones who get selected are often those who blindly copy projects from GitHub and grind LeetCode day and night without understanding a single thing they have built. Companies ask for your LeetCode profile link. That is it. Not your domain knowledge, not your mindset, not your passion for the field. Just your ranking. Your CGPA defines your worth. Your LeetCode score defines your entire trajectory. It is exhausting. Showing up to round after round, knowing exactly how it is going to go, and still questioning whether you are en