As someone recently interviewing I targeted roles where I didn't have to jump through these hoops and it worked out fine. Contacting people I had worked with be

As someone recently interviewing I targeted roles where I didn't have to jump through these hoops and it worked out fine. Contacting people I had worked with before who could vouch for me made it much easier to land a job. The top companies with these leetcode tests probably don't care that good people being rejected or avoiding them because of the amount of preparation required. Middle sized companies and startups doing leetcode tests are missing good people and probably can't afford the same number of false negatives as someone like Google with an endless supply of candidates. I would much rather spend a weekend doing a take home test and showing how I actually work than being asked to write irrelevant code on a whiteboard. I think leetcode style interviewing is driven by time constraints of the interviewer and some more effort and thought needs to be put in on how to choose people based on the specifics of the actual role they are hiring for.