I can sympathise with this. Engineering isn’t a linear track. Being able to consistently smash leetcode puzzles out the park will land you a $250k total comp

I can sympathise with this. Engineering isn’t a linear track. Being able to consistently smash leetcode puzzles out the park will land you a $250k total comp FAANG graduate job, but the more experienced you are the less crucial the puzzle stuff becomes. For a punk grad, being good at bubble sort is all they have. They have no engineering taste, no immune system trained to respond to dodgy design, and no discipline to evaluate when it would be effective to push back on something versus avoiding unnecessary drama. I recently went through several rounds of interviews where the only code I wrote was on my own time, after I had outlined a solution to a practical problem in each of the interviews. I have landed my dream job at a business that’s just closed a series B. I was delighted to be treated like an adult whose technical ability wasn’t fundamentally questioned as part of the application process, but whose organisational maturity and approach to working with a team was. The truth is out there.