I applied to a lot of the companies on that list. I also focus on fullstack roles. I think my experience is that 50% of the tech interviews end up being leetcode stuff.
I have deep knowledge of the underlying technologies, mostly deep knowledge of the languages. But my experience is that most interviewers do not care about this. They want to hear about your last project using their laundry list of libraries. Everyone wants me to assure them that I am a "React expert" or that I have "used AWS" and no one cares about the papers I've read recently or the first-principles, ground-up projects I've done. The only time anything approaching specialized knowledge comes up is when people ask trivia questions.
I've had a couple people review my resume but they were all non-technical. That's a good suggestion.
In the two technical interviews I failed, one was an algo question that I bombed. I choked and everyone understood it was no-go. The other was a practical coding exercise that I failed but I didn't get any feedback. I can guess why but I'm not sure what was expected. I don't think anyone could have done the exercise perfectly in the time given, so I went with one set of trade-offs. Maybe I'm wrong and I'm just too slow, or maybe I chose the wrong trade-offs.
I've actually started turning down places that do leetcode-style interviews unless I'm really interested in working there. There are a fair amount of places that do other kinds of interviews, if that's any comfort. But the compensation will probably be less than FAANG, with some exceptions.
One of the companies apparently used TripleByte for the tech screen. They gave me a multiple choice test that I scored highly on (don't know the exact score) and after that I started getting emails about completing the TripleByte process. Is it worth it? I tend to assume these things are scams.
I've had a couple interviews that mentioned the blog posts as being a factor in giving me an interview. But I definitely agree that these things are valued very little and that's ok. My resume and what I say in interviews focuses on past work performance. I mentioned these things in an attempt to provide some details to support my claim that I'm an ok developer.
- I'm a U.S. citizen based in the U.S., though my most recent work experience is in a foreign country. I'm applying to jobs in the major tech hubs. I have previous experience in one of those locations.
- All applications in response to ads.
I've been working with a recruiter but they haven't done much for me. Very generic resume feedback (e.g. "Here's an example of a good resume. Just compare yours.") and no feedback from recruiter when companies turn me down.