I've interviewed at a lot of companies this summer, and landed a similar remote job, x2 your salary target. I was even choosing between a few different offers. I did not train on leetcode, and I've explicitly said it to interviewers — I like to present my skills as they are when I work, not some temporarily buffed up version. I also don't remember what different letters in SOLID mean.
I still got some live coding questions, which weren't that hard. For example, one of the problems was classic n queens. I remembered the problem, but didn't remember the solution, and had to come up with it in 45 minutes. Interviewer even pointed out that my solution ended up being not one of the more common ones — it was a bit quirky and awkward, but it worked.
But most of the interviews were centred around more practical problems: take-homes with realistic tasks, or questions about architecture that didn't have one "correct" solutions but served more as conversation starters. May be it's because I didn't interview at FAANGS (I really dislike working at companies that have more than 100 employees), but overwhelming majority of the companies that I talked to had excellent interview process and I did not feel as if they were testing irrelevant skills like leetcode grinding or API memoization.
I still got some live coding questions, which weren't that hard. For example, one of the problems was classic n queens. I remembered the problem, but didn't remember the solution, and had to come up with it in 45 minutes. Interviewer even pointed out that my solution ended up being not one of the more common ones — it was a bit quirky and awkward, but it worked.
But most of the interviews were centred around more practical problems: take-homes with realistic tasks, or questions about architecture that didn't have one "correct" solutions but served more as conversation starters. May be it's because I didn't interview at FAANGS (I really dislike working at companies that have more than 100 employees), but overwhelming majority of the companies that I talked to had excellent interview process and I did not feel as if they were testing irrelevant skills like leetcode grinding or API memoization.