I agree actually, I've had a similar experience except in the mobile engineering space.
Currently I'm going through the interview process with a ton of companies (because my company is really dumb and is forcing everyone to move back to a certain bay area city post-covid), and I have been happily surprised to find that most of my interviews are very practical, project based, ones instead of straight whiteboarding leetcode problems. I've received several take-home projects that are followed up with a simple add-on interview to sit down and explain the choices made during the take-home. They have all been specifically focused on domain knowledge to the mobile platform that I'm interviewing for. Its really nice! I hope this trend continues.
That said, I am still reviewing leetcode problems for the stupid faang interviews I have coming up as well.
I just went through this with a company. They sent me a generic packet with 3 projects to choose from. With a simple Google search I was able to find all of the answers to all 3 sample projects implemented in different languages.
This was after a 10 minute conversation with the company's recruiter. To top it off, nothing in the job listing said anything about software. Just Cloud and Devops management role.
I am absolutely ok with take home or some presentation of my skills. However, I expect to know that I am being taken seriously as a candidate by that point. I don't want to waste my time on something with no investment from the company.
As you can guess, I bowed out of the running explaining that I didn't think it was appropriate for me to give them so much of my time with no commitment from their end. I also told them I could tell their take home project took them less than 5 minutes to generate for me as it was everywhere on the internet. How can I trust a process where the answers to the interview are everywhere? How can they really know my skills as a candidate if I can just steal the answers off of GitHub? Worse, how can I know how I will stack up to someone who might be less scrupulous than I and steal those answers when I tried in earnest and actually burned an afternoon trying to solve their test?
Currently I'm going through the interview process with a ton of companies (because my company is really dumb and is forcing everyone to move back to a certain bay area city post-covid), and I have been happily surprised to find that most of my interviews are very practical, project based, ones instead of straight whiteboarding leetcode problems. I've received several take-home projects that are followed up with a simple add-on interview to sit down and explain the choices made during the take-home. They have all been specifically focused on domain knowledge to the mobile platform that I'm interviewing for. Its really nice! I hope this trend continues.
That said, I am still reviewing leetcode problems for the stupid faang interviews I have coming up as well.