My initial interviews were disastrous; it had been many years since my last job search and I didn't know I wasn't prepared for the "leetcode era". Drilling on "leetcode medium" problems with a time limit got me to the point where I was at least in the game that's being played nowadays.
It wasn't pretty, but eventually I got around to progressing and getting an offer instead of getting "nope'd" at the early stages. The job-interview repertoire has definitely changed in the last 15 years though, and it takes some work to get conversant with it.
If you really want the position, you will put a lot of effort into researching what the interview will entail.
If you're a hard worker, you will intensively study for the interview.
If you're smart, you'll be able to apply the material you studied to the problem, and you'll probably realize the game you're playing.
None of these things is about 'engineering skill', which is much more difficult to discover, and only really valuable if the person is a smart, hard worker, who sticks around.
*edit: I am not saying that I like this style of interview, and when I interview job candidates, I never engage in this type of 'test'
A sensible knowledge and performance evaluation would involve pair coding on limited scope, immediate, real problems, not BS trivia.
Interviewing is a two-way street.. the signals given-off in the interview process should be taken in as a totality by the interviewee as well. If they see bad signs, they should run in the opposite direction rather than get sucked into a bad environment.
Full disclosure; I have never done an interview like this, or tried to land a job at a major 'tech' company, though I do have a degree in engineering.
If I didn’t have any other option besides the standard r/cscareerquestions “Learn leetCode and work for a FAANG” , I would.
Are those interview processes really optimising for candidates who are willing and able to spend silly amounts of time creating an illusion of being super-keen?
Not even five years ago this style of interviewing was looked down upon by most.
It is true that I use a hard algorithm maybe 8 times a year. But I need my coworkers to be able to understand them when we do. So that's one part of it.
Another major part is having you go into detail about complexity and tradeoffs. Believe it or not most of my co-workers can derrive these things on the fly, not memorized. Others require a little think.
The third is algorithms boil down to simple interviews where only a few things can go meta wrong. There are other types of question but they have a lot more failure modes and are even harder to train people to give.
I understand that for a big company they need something standardized to process a large number of candidates.
Thankfully, at the same time (this was in 2011), I was also in the process of interviewing for a startup that treated me like a real person with individual skills and experiences of value. That interview process went a lot better, and did result in me getting hired.
(And Amazon recruiters still pester me to this day, despite me having little interest in working for them.)
SV is an outlier among outliers in almost every respect, even among other large metro areas with big tech industries like NYC, Chicago, or Austin. To the point where advice should always clarify whether it pertains to SV or non-SV, because it's usually one or the other.
Edit: typo
I think I should have tried the local recruiter approach back when I was in Dallas and getting bupkis for hits. Unfortunately, I bought too heavily into the "lol recruiters r trash" meme and didn't consider the type of recruiter before dismissing them wholesale.
Also, I left the workforce because I don't find working for Darwinian corporations or without equity to be a valuable or fair use of my time or meritocratic compensation.
Edit:
There is a huge difference between random spam from recruiters who throw a big net and working with local boutique recruiters who have relationships with local firms. I ignore the former.