Which good / high profile companies can hire without System Design / Architecture?
For an experienced SWE (Sr / Staff)? LC is fine - actually, I tend to enjoy it. And preparing for it makes you a better engineer. But system design interview is complete bs, subjective, too contrived and no practical value to prepare.
Why do you think system design interview is BS?
Sys design interview is not BS if you gain relevant experience in designing similar systems. I think this might be hard experience to gain in bigger companies
Yes, this is a part of the problem. I guess it's easier for someone who is a "full stack" engineer, who assembles some fairly generic vertical solution from existing open-source products, like a database, a message queue, an rpc library etc. If you're doing some fairly specialized part of a large system, of if your company prefers to everything in-house, it's much harder.
If you have a narrow specialization and want to work for a company which hires generalists (like FB or GOOG) then you have to learn this stuff.
How does leetcode make you a better engineer. In fact aren't there studies that show competitive programming prowess is inversely proportional to job effectiveness
Totally agree on this. System design is bs and is more for people who do nosql dB, Kafka etc in day today activity. It is very unreasonable to expect in depth knowledge from someone who works in entirely different field eg- routing protocols, Hw-Sw, sdk , Linux user apps etc. leetcode is not bs and seems to be a good way to filter out unprepared candidates
For a senior position probably none...