Logged every question from 23 interviews in a spreadsheet and the patterns weren't what I expected

Started this out of spite honestly, after a round where I got asked something I'd already been asked twice before and still fumbled it. One row per question: company, round type, the question, what I actually said, what I wish I'd said.

Six months and 23 interviews later, some of this surprised me.

• Roughly a third of everything was some flavour of "tell me about a time you disagreed with someone." A third. I had spent almost all my prep time on DSA.
• Nobody asked me to reverse a linked list. Not once. Plenty of "here's a messy function, make it better."
• The questions I bombed clustered hard, and it was almost always about tradeoffs I'd made, never about syntax.
• Every single company asked some version of "why are you leaving." I gave a slightly different answer for the first ten, which is probably why none of them landed.

The spreadsheet didn't make me smarter. It made it obvious where my prep time was going versus where I was actually losing rounds. Took me far too long to see that gap.