My salary is very good. I've never joined a company that does leetcode interviews. Only two of the companies I've worked for have been startups.

Very good compared to Google and Facebook, or is that a subjective statement?

But to be honest, your answer is not likely to change my opinion. For the vast majority of new grads leetcode is the obvious recommendation to maximize income. People grind for 3-4 months because it actually works, that's the reality.

Very good in that it puts me in the top 10% in terms of earning potential on the planet.

You have a different target employer than I do, and that's fine. I optimize for a different set of requirements.

Sounds a lot like you actually are one of the many individuals who do not optimize for salary.

Maybe OP is, too. If he isn't, I think my suggestion is appropriate.

I wonder if that itself is certain type of filter. For people who are ready to spend lot of unpaid hours for job. Might this also expand to their work?

I've worked for exactly one startup on a devops team of three. The coders next door to us were mostly fresh out of university and most of them thought they were the cat's pajamas. They worked for a fairly crusty former military cyber dude who had likely forgotten more about programming then they would ever know. Military dude told us that code checks were an eye-opener for these guys. There's boot camps, university, and then the real world. The real world is often not what these kids think it is. Same kids were shocked when I told them the company ran the back end on Bash and Python. They were incredulous we weren't using Golang, Haskell, or some other flavor-of-the-month language. I told them to go ask what runs their bank. None of them had the faintest idea it was COBOL. The one COBOL programmer I know is in his 60s, already retired and comes out as needed for the princely sum of $200/hour every couple of months for contract work. Beer money as he calls it. Guy retired a millionaire from COBOL but you'd never know it looking at his modest house and hatchback car.

I don't get the modern (?) obsession with having the latest tech in your resume.

Knowing how to solve problems for someone willing to pay you a lot for it seems to trump knowing how to solve problems in a specific way. I've improved my salary more by putting work towards fixing things for existing code bases than I have by building brand new things on brand new technology.

With that said... having been in the position of the hot-headed junior engineer full of ideas, I don't think that position's without merit either. The trick is to balance new ideas for the employer, personal knowledge growth, improved performance for the employer, and making the right kind of mistakes.

In that latter bit, I don't think _anyone_ has figured it out, yet. Not in a way that's easily repeatable, anyway.

Yeah, I think that's actually part of the intent of the whiteboarding in the first place. How type-A and career-obsessed are you? Enough to spend months learning tangentially relevant material to pass an interview?

Many startups cargo-cult these poor hiring practices.

The good news is that that's a predictor for a shitty startup (or at least a predictor for a startup that isn't focused on building things)