After going through the process of 5 interviews across multiple companies, I would much rather be given an open ended question and do a 1 hour presentation. I am so tired of going into a technical not knowing which leetcode question I have to memorize.

It is absolutely absurd some of the study plans that people go through where they are trying to study over multiple months. In order to truly memorize all the solutions, most people need these programs. Otherwise, it's just a luck of the draw. I actually got stuck at an interview because I forgot the nlogn solution for two sums. Absurd!

My favorite interview so far involved opening a raw TCP socket to Postgres and sending a query (Actually relevant to the job). I was given the prompt ahead of the interview and spent about 2 hours figuring it out. I learned something valuable and demonstrated an ability to expand my knowledge base. This interview has been the only one even remotely close to demonstrating my abilities to work at the job.

30 might be too much but it also depends somewhat on the probability of success. 100 hrs practicing leetcode + systems design for a 2% chance at a FAANG seems a worse trade off than 30hrs researching an interesting subject for a presentation with an 80% chance of success. Problem is you don’t know what your chances are with the latter going in but I think it would be a fair question to ask.

I agree and initially I refused but the problem space was interesting and I wanted to get in it so I did it.

Yeah, a valid philosophy is that a company should have to spend at least as many man-hours interviewing me as I spend interviewing.

I do IT so I'm not an elite member of society like most of the devs here. But I had an org give me some homework that was solving a problem they actively needed fixed. I took a job with a different company (still had like 5 or 6 interviews for that place but no 12 hours of homework) because it felt gross to be doing 'free' work for them.