I read the guide to engineering interviews you posted, but I am curious about the difference between your "Technical Screen" and leetcode type questions. Having to solve a problem while someone is watching and having to talk while you do it sounds similar to the FAANG style. Maybe I'm missing something?
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From our guide:
> Please prepare a skeleton web application, using any web server framework you like, preferably a lightweight one, e.g. express (node), flask (python), sinatra (ruby).
> Have a tool to send payloads to your server and inspect responses, for example cURL or Postman. No front-end client is required other than cURL or Postman to send test requests. This will be a backend only exercise.
This is a far cry from leetcode stuff - these are real world tools and concepts many developers use every day. Yes, it is an interview with time pressure, talking, and problem solving. But, the tools and problem are much closer to web development than they are to a CS51 graph proof.
Hmm I don't see the quoted text in the guide. Maybe it's something different internally?
The page I see only says there's a 60min "language-agnostic coding exercise" and that you have to share your screen and talk through your thought process. That's why it felt similar to leetcode stuff.
LeetCode is a problem that took a famous computer scientist a month to write a paper about, but you have 30 minutes in a proprietary web app to either remember or re-invent it, and pass a test suite.
LeetCode-type interviews are about 60% a how-bad-do-you-want-this test, and 40% a barely-concealed IQ test.
I'm not even sure that's the wrong way for FAANG to do things, given how many people want to work there. I do know it's a damn bad idea for any place not offering FAANG-like comp, since at lower comp levels you're in competition with a ton of places that don't demand hours of grinding leetcode to prove you want the job bad enough.