h1b transfer loop ended yesterday. used interview coder. no regrets.
my current employer is doing a quiet layoff round and I had 60 days of grace period before leaving the country. I had to land a transfer loop and i had to pass it.
loop was a mid size fintech, not faang but paid comparably. 4 rounds, 2 coding, 1 system design, 1 behavioral. I used interviewcoder.co in all of them.
I want to say something clearly because i have read the comments on other threads like this. I have 4 years of experience. I am a good engineer. I can write backend code. what I did not have time to do was spend two weeks memorizing this specific company's stack, their api conventions, the way they shard their payment tables, their idempotency patterns, their internal consistency model, and whatever else they care about. every shop has their own version of "we do it this way here" and honestly after an hour of going through their docs I could not care less about their structure.
So I skipped the deep company prep. loaded the basics into the overlay, their engineering blog posts on sharding, their stated architectural style, the public stuff i could scrape in an afternoon. when the interviewer asked me to extend my design to fit their consistency model i glanced at the outline and picked up where i would have if i had spent the weekend memorizing their docs.
offer came through in 5 days. h1b transfer is in motion. i can stay.
you can have whatever ethical opinion you want on this. when you have two weeks before your grace period you got to do what you got to do