Give SoCal a shot. You can get very competitive salaries when compared with NorCal right down here, and the cost of living is not quite as bad.

I'm hiring Ruby devs down in Costa Mesa, and I don't ask any algorithm questions :)

This is something I'm struggling with right now. It seems like there are endless opportunities but are they really opportunities if you can't get past the "leetcode or GTFO" barrier? And even if you do get past it that only gets you in for a full day of being grilled on other arbitrary measures with zero feedback as to why you didn't get the offer. I feel like spending time trying to be able to solve these coding "challenges" only detracts from time I could be spending learning more useful ways to code or actually, you know, building applications.