Comment by mexicocitinluez
9 days ago
> Most engineers (including me) spent months grinding LeetCode at least twice in their career, studying system design, and passing grueling 6-round interviews to prove they are the “top 1%.”
Really grateful that the opportunities I've been given weren't predicated on knowing things completely irrelevant to my job. I have spent exactly zero time solving LeetCode problems in my career (beyond algorithm stuff in college).
It's perfectly possible to have a successful SWE career without touching Leetcode-style questions. It's just that most of those jobs don't pay well.
As a Clojure developer I have the opposite experience. The more they ignore my open source work, the more they never call up any of my references, the more they give me useless test jobs and assignments unrelated to the actual work, the more it's a signal of a place with poor engineering culture and generally also not that great salaries.
However the places that actually do read my open source work, do contact my references, and where the interview has had no tech assignments of any kind other than a simple discussion about a variety of topics, perhaps just going over some of my OSS projects, the higher the salary has been.
This is in Northern Europe though, your mileage may vary.