I asked them to give me BE work but only gave me 15-20% of BE work rest FE. So i was not happy with it, but i worked till I made sure i have good enough projects(45-50mins of discussion on happy flow, edge cases, scaling etc) to talk about in HM round.
And no pay cuts i joined new org with 80% hike.
It took me 3 months to prepare and crack, where i used to do divC/D in contests, was sound with cp/dsa.
But this was initial of my career I had 1+ year exp. that time.
In that time, I interviewed with 5 companies, cracked two, said no to rest 3, all were mid-large startups.