If you need to practice leetcode like things for interviews, aren’t you also doing free ‘work’? Only in that case it’s more proof-of-work than something actually useful. Perhaps one could point at the openly viewable results when talking to other companies.

The strategy strikes me as a little weird but not crazy. If you like open source already, it might make a lot of sense.

> If you need to practice leetcode like things for interviews, aren’t you also doing free ‘work’? Only in that case it’s more proof-of-work than something actually useful.

This might be true, but at least the skills are easy to show off on a resume and will help you with other interviews. Open-source contributions might vary drastically in nature and might be harder to leverage as experience/proof of skill

Many tech interviews at startups are simply: "talk about a project you once did :)"

Where do you find these startups? My experience with startup interviews is FAANGesque leetcode + system design questions.

Not all is lost if you don't end up getting a job with them. Open source work makes for great resume bullets.

Yes, this is all a good disclaimer. YMMV like with everything else.

There's no guarantees anywhere in this strategy. But there's nice correlations