By season, I am assuming you mean the Covid period (2020 to present). Got showered with dozens of recruiter emails for various companies. As a rule, I generall

By season, I am assuming you mean the Covid period (2020 to present). Got showered with dozens of recruiter emails for various companies. As a rule, I generally do not cold apply to any company as my experience has been that doing so is a first class ticket to being ignored. However I'm also pretty selective as to what companies I'm interested in, so the vast majority I did not proceed with. 1. First interview was with a FAANG, where I failed the phone screen largely due to the interviewer having a thick accent on top of him using a speakerphone that made things worse. 2. Next, had a friend refer me to the FAANG he works at, but was ignored. 3. & 4. Interviewed at two mid tier companies and got lowball offers, so declined. Standard leetcode questions. One of them gave me homework. These happened more or less in parallel, which is rare for me. Got more bites from three non-FAANGMULA companies that I'd rank as on the same top tier. These also proceeded in parallel. 5. Passed the phone screen for one but failed the virtual on site. Mix of leetcode and JavaScript trivia. The phone screener was a "celebrity engineer" and apparently commented in feedback to the recruiter that I was one of the most talented JavaScript engineers he had ever interviewed. Alas I think what bombed me during the virtual on site was when I was asked to describe one of my previous projects in detail. I choked. 6. Passed phone screen and three different virtual on sites for the second, got offer. Mix of leetcode and JavaScript trivia. 7. Passed the phone screen and the homework for the second. Mix of leetcode and JavaScript trivia. On site got scheduled. But everything was moving very slowly. So I took the offer from the second company. I'm a frontend/fullstack engineer. Interviews were a mix of leetcode and "do this in JavaScript" type problems. I would say leetcode has lost some of its dominance in my particular niche in favor of these JavaScript trivia type problems. I'd say the fact that I was WFH due to the pandemic greatly facilitated both the logistics of interviewing and grinding leetcode/JavaScript trivia. I don't think I'm the only one, since my department at my previous company saw a massive exodus of people. I saw more people depart for greener pastures in the summer of 2021 than I saw in my entire 7 year tenure there. Also, I did two homeworks. Generally I make it a point to simply refuse any homework assignments because they do not s cale (vs. leetcode which hugely scales horizontally). However in the case of one of the mid-tier companies, the assignment was genuinely fun so I accepted it. In the case of the other, the company was both prestigious and high paying enough that I went ahead with it. In both cases I got exceptional marks, but also took far more than the supposedly "few hours" they said.