Is work experience and personal side projects not enough?
I understand that we as engineers must follow the the tide of the industry and adapt to its current and future challenges. But spending time outside of work to "practice" these style of questions leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
Any advice is welcome.
Smart employers and good interviewers will spend time with you, ask you hard questions, get to the bottom of what you know and don't know without asking you to spend hours writing some useless piece of code, or giving you algorithmic problems for a job that will rarely if ever use them. That said, just because I dislike leetcode style interviews and take home problems doesn't mean I dislike hard questions, tough problems and figuring out how you think. I just think it is highly disrespectful and frankly discriminatory against experienced people to ask them to spend hours writing code as part of an interview process or answering questions which the entire industry knows people have to study for to get pass. I call it discriminatory because anyone with a life, family etc can't sacrifice the 4-6 hours for each employer x maybe 10-15 employers they applied to and are working through the process on. Not to mention the 1-2 months of study time just to pass a "test" that won't do anything but get them to the next reviewer as sorry it won't improve their job skills overall. So it is gamed for the young, fresh out of school engineers because they are typically single (hence lots of free time), still in the study mode and they don't know better how disrespectful an employer is being when they won't give you the time of day till you swing from branch to branch like a good monkey.
I am a prior founder and a current CTO for a startup, and I absolutely do not allow these types of interviews, I also happen to have been writing professional code since the early 90's and lived through the dot com days when people thought this style of interviewing was good (me included btw) until we learned it gave us smart people but not people who could deliver products or solve real problems. So for my interviews and how I train people to conduct interviews. We focus on learning who you are, what you bring to the table and that if you joined you will elevate the team both technically and culturally. That means, you will get asked hard technical questions, you will get tough scenarios to think through, but you will do that with someone on the team at all times and you are free to ask us questions to help you. We will not give you a useless test and say if you can pass this then we will talk to you. No, that's crap. We will ask you how to talk through real world problems, for example, we will ask you what data structures you would use for a given scenario and why, we will ask you what the consequences of those choices are, and we will collaboratively see if we can work through problems together. I don't care if you can write a perfect line of code or most optimized loop in whatever language, I care that you know what to write and when. Because with that knowledge you'll figure out how to do it in any language you know or learn.
Please also don't misunderstand me, I think people are using the leetcode style not out of intentional disrespect but out of a lack of training & understanding of how to properly conduct interviews and find out what someone knows and is good at. It seems logical to them, they give you a problem today and you come back to them in a couple of days when you have solved it, shouldn't take you more than a few hours they say. Yet the reality is the message this interviewer is sending is that you are not important enough to talk to until you can jump this high, and oh, btw the height of the stick is relative to what the interviewer thinks is good but you don't know the interviewer so good luck with your guess. The interviewer sees it as a way to weed through lots of resumes and only talk to those who are "serious", but in the end they just eliminate most of the best candidates that have experience and self respect because someone with experience and self respect knows a good interviewer.
I really cannot stress enough, it is not that I don't believe in hard questions, I just believe it has to be done in a way that is conducive to learning about the candidate, and you cannot do that in a leet style code interview or in take home tests. I don't care what you think you know, the only way to learn about the candidate is to respectfully talk to them like an intelligent colleague and see what they know and don't know.