> The average Amazon engineer is not expected to have awareness of CS fundamentals that go beyond LeetCode-y challenges
I find this a bit unsettling. There are dozens of great CS schools in the US. Even non-elite BSc programs in EU sometimes teach formal methods.
There are also some good introductory books now, e.g. [1]. Perhaps its time to interview more on concepts and less on algorithmic tricks favored by LeetCode?
I doubt current undergrads can't go beyond LeetCode-like challenges.
[1] Formal Methods, An Appetizer. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-05156-3
Modern CS programs teach to what they perceive to be the interview their students will encounter after graduation: what is a tree data structure, how to craft a SQL query and how to calculate a CRC with a python library. More advanced CS/CE departments still teach discrete math and compilers/parsing for students intending to go to grad schools.
My experience with recent CS grads is it's easier to hire Art and Political Science grads and take the time to teach them programming and all it's fundamentals. At least they won't argue with you when you tell them not to use regexes to parse HTML.
* The average Amazon engineer is not expected to have awareness of CS fundamentals that go beyond LeetCode-y challenges
* The average Amazon engineer builds using tools which are each developed by a small core team who _are_ expected to know those fundamentals, and who package up those concepts to be usefully usable without full understanding
(I did 10 years on CDO, and my experience matches yours when interacting with my peers, but every time I interacted with the actual Builder Tools teams I was very aware that lived in different worlds)