I mean, if you want to work at Google and the likes, you need to indulge in the game right? And working at Google isn't just about the pay and the salary - thats quite a shallow thing to say. Engineers there handle data of astronomcial proportions, scale their systems every second to handle the ever-growing traffic, innovate on solutions that are used by millions of people around the world. I'd say, if you truly love programming and computer science, thats a pretty sweet deal.
The people who spend their days obsessively networking and practicing interview questions are generally not the people who would find problems about scaling to handle astronomical proportions of data interesting. The people who find that interesting tend to spend their days reading about scalability and performance. I'm not talking about someone putting aside a few weeks to a month to study up on these questions, I'm talking about people who straight up neglect their CS education because they want to pass a technical interview.
