The only place where I really met high expectation is in finance. The amount of ten-seconds-for-the-answer-or-we-stop-the-interview questions was enormous. Las

The only place where I really met high expectation is in finance. The amount of ten-seconds-for-the-answer-or-we-stop-the-interview questions was enormous. Last 5 places I interviewed, 2 didn't ask LC at all, and I still failed at 4. Also, for LC, you should work on it for 15-30 minutes and then look at the solution. It's the most efficient way. If you don't even understand the task, just don't do it. Similarly, sites like codeforces allow you to group tasks by algorithm and to sort them by number of people that solved them (and you can look at the solutions). This also simplifies the knowledge acquisition. As for being a principal/staff engineer. This is all new to me and I have no idea how much these individuals code or what exactly they do (although I'm currently starting a principal engineer role in a company of around 300 engineers). So I assume either I'm silly or the title inflation is rampant. Although, the interview required operating systems, networking, algorithms, hardware, people skills, low/high level programming language knowledge that I guess I have. The questions were: "How does a UI library work?", "Describe this networking protocol?", "How many syscalls are triggered by npm install?", and whatever other question that they ask you to go as deeply as possible as you can.