I think what would work better is to get away from leetcode and do more internally developed design and coding exercises that are representations of the kind of things you’d see at that company. Yeah for FAANG type companies who are hiring thousands of engineers per year, maybe you need the leetcode style standardization in order to scale. But for everyone else that cargo culted these processes and doesn’t need to hire 5 engineers per day, it’d be great to step back and actually consider what you want to evaluate for.
> Unless you've made it to your "endgame" company that you're happy to stay at for a while, I feel investing anything more than the bare minimum to get your assigned work done is worth less than just grinding leetcode and otherwise studying for interviews. Doing an actual good job, above and beyond, is not going to be worth much when you're looking for your next job. Thus we're now seeing the rise of Professional Interviewers or Professional Leetcoders.
Very much this. With interviewing having become a second career in an unrelated field, people will choose whether to spend most of their energy in working the job or preparing for the next interview rounds in a year.
I always interview people based on the actual job they've been doing (based on what they claim on the resume). I don't care how good you are at leetcode because that's not what the job will be about. I care how and what you've been doing in your current and past jobs. So we talk about that instead.
But big tech all have quarterly OKRs, performance plans and terminations for low performers, and managers/leads are interested to have strong contributors in team to deliver results, and let low performers to go..
If half the team is simply doing interview prep it’s unlikely management fires half the team.
...none of which information is shared with future employers. To do so is even considered a legally actionable violation of privacy in most cases.
Until you hit the Senior/Staff level, no one really gives a crap if you were editing yaml files, toiling on a legacy app, or building the highest scale app on the planet. It just matters that you can pass the standard tech interview.
Now that people understand this, they are starting to optimize their careers at a company to simply do the minimum until they move externally for higher pay. You can bounce between reasonable tech companies doing literally nothing for higher and higher pay by simply switching once per year.
I suspect that we'll see a steady increase in attention paid for deliverables and a dialing down of the leetcode arms race over the next 5 years. The signal to noise ratio of this interview type is falling.