I interviewed at Amazon for a principle engineering position - got the interview as my resume has some pretty high profile accomplishments. But they just asked me leetcode questiins all day. I don't practice leetcoding so needless to say I didn't do well. Everyone there looked tired and worn out, probably dodged a bullet.
I was approached for Principal at AWS by the team's hiring manager, and I liked them, and was interested in the team's work. But when they couldn't exempt me from the company-standard initial coding screen, I withdrew my application.
I'm sure the manager was great, but we've all heard of some less-desirable aspects of working at Amazon, and I wouldn't want to go there without a sign that I'd be shielded a bit.
So, I've made the "corporate drone coding screen", and Leetcode interviews in general, my own metric. If a company does it, they fail the interview.
And if I'm having a moment of weakness, and considering submitting to some techbro frat hazing, I remind myself that, if I was willing to do that, I would've gone to Google already, which usually would've preferable to whatever opportunity this other company is dangling.
It’s because they’re not interested in engineers, they’re looking for visa workers from cultures that optimize for grinding those types of questions