I also dont have much time. But I have big financial buffers as I assume most 30-40 year old developers do. We can afford to not work 3-4 months while learning and looking for a new job. And if thats not possible surely we can squeeze in 20 minutes daily doing leetcode on the job? Most of us don't actually put in 9 hours of actual work. Don't get me wrong I hate this process. I am just saying it can be done when you have kids.
So, having just had a kid, perhaps I can give some insight (from my perspective, at least).
Every minute I spend on take-homes (oh dear lord the take-homes) is a minute I'm dumping the childcare responsibilities on my wife. And she heads out to work, so I do a bunch of childcare in the mornings/evenings.
Then I also have a full-time job. Like, unless I want to stop sleeping I don't have a whole lot of time to do this stuff.
I just (mostly) finished one and it was because my wife took the baby out to meet other mums.
The worst part is that I have lots and lots of work online, plenty of GH repos and a bunch of really selective companies on my CV. And yet still every time I need to prove that I can in fact call read.csv and do a bunch of data manipulation/analysis.
And I love doing this work. I can only imagine what this is like for someone for whom it's just a career (which is totally fine, tbh).
