I have a couple great companies on my resume because I ground these leetcode questions, but now that I’ve been working and in industry for 14 years… I don’t hav

I have a couple great companies on my resume because I ground these leetcode questions, but now that I’ve been working and in industry for 14 years… I don’t have the time to do the grind unless I’m explicitly looking for a job. The DS&A skills are still there, I use them and I’m glad I have them, but when someone reaches out to me to join their startup out of the blue and then hits me with the leetcode hard question that I haven’t seen in 8 years… well I’ve not passed those interviews. Usually I don’t say “ok, I’ll study for 4 weeks before the rounds” so I go in cold. I never give these type of questions in my interviews of senior/staff+, I build out topical problems for the space I’m actually hiring for, then simplify it down to the interesting bits. I give a ramp, a simple problem, a more complex tweak to the simple problem that needs an interesting data structure (maybe needs a heap or similar) and then another tweak that forces them to abandon that data structure and do something novel. You can also fail this and still get hired. With junior engineers, I’m sorry but I need something that looks like leetcode so I know you put the work in, and I can’t ask the topical questions because they have no frame of reference. These questions are like the common denominator for someone with no real world skills. I need to see that you’re driven and self motivated enough to teach yourself this (probably useless, when is the last time you had to implement merge sort) skill. I also don’t think there is a great alternative. I put an extraordinary amount of work into making my questions that aren’t Leetcode, when they leak I’m heartbroken. I don’t want to just let a fancy school be the decision point, so I need to find a fair way to test. Asking people to do 1-2 days work or pair program… it’s usually caused a lot of dropping out of the funnel. So I would love to hear alternatives that are working for others