Which good companies in the Bay Area don't do LeetCode style interviews for SWE positions?
I have around 15 years experience with background mainly in Java, Restful, Springboot etc. I was impacted by layoffs and I am on a H1B. Hence I have limited time before which I should choose a job. I do not have extensive time for preparing LeetCode in this short time span. I would like to know if there are mid-level companies (not startups, not big tech) that do non-leetcode style interviews. Like, a take home assignment, or some other demo kind of interviews.
Discussion
(1 comment)- 1
a month agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroI imagine this repo isn't tightly updated as job postings go down, but this should be helpful: https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
In general though, it is very hard to avoid LeetCode entirely with an interview. I think the best you can do is LeetCode-Lite, where the company only has 1 DSA round and it's of easy/medium difficulty. I think it's worth spending 30-60 minutes a day doing basic DSA problems (i.e. avoid LeetCode hard).
When it comes to which companies do less LeetCode, it generally correlates with size. Smaller companies, especially cutting-edge startups, are less concerned about your abstract DSA ability and more so with your actual ability to build software. I talk about this in-depth in our job searching course across these lessons:
At Robinhood, the interview was LeetCode-Lite in that I only had 1 DSA round. I actually didn't even finish the problem in that round and still got an offer! So even unicorns can potentially be LeetCode-Lite. What I will say though is that front-end engineering (web, iOS, Android) is more likely to have less LeetCode as it's more tangible.
