Source:: Back on the leetcode after 4 years…it’s awful : cscareerquestions
Pain
OP
- “awful”
- “I started hitting the leetcode, thinking it can’t be that hard…and boy was I wrong.”
- “These are tough”
- “I can do most medium in a half hour or so, but only naive solutions (n2).”
- “I’m fairly nervous for the interviews now”
- “don’t think I have given myself enough time to prepare”
- “I’m also shocked how little I remember”
Others
- “there’s always something to nitpick on to make you fail if the interviewer doesn’t like you”
- “(recruiters) are known to be full of shit”
- “100% of the time if they failed to solve it (or i did when interviewing) the candidate was passed up. Didnt matter the experience they brought, projects they worked on, how well they did in other aspects. They were passed by.”
- “Even if you crush the system design they’ll fail you on a n2 solution.”
- “…what the hell are these questions meant to gauge? So stupid.”
Jargon
- Bay Area
- Senior Engineer
- entry-level
- interviews
- LeetCode
- n
- algorithm
- grinding
- system design
- optimal
- interviewer
- recruiter
- candidate
- coding challenge
- FAANG
- Amazon
- application
- LC-hard (LeetCode hard)
- phone screen (as in screening before a job interview)
- complexity (Big O)
- proof
- DP problem
- exponential
- novel problem
- Djikstra
- BFS
- graph bottleneck problem
- VMWare
- screening
- role
- new grad
- HackerRank
- TLE- time limit exceeded
- PhD
- API
- linked lists
- graphs
- codebase
- perks
- catered lunch
- WFH- work from home
- unicorn
- Square
- Stripe
- Lyft
- DSA
- arrays
- strings
- hashmaps
- queues
- stacks
- trees
- runtime
Recommendations
- “You’re not expected to figure it out yourself”
- lots of people agreeing and dissenting
- “You can ask for hints and interviewers might help you out if you seriously struggle”
- Cracking the Coding Interview (book)
- “I’m currently doing 1-2 leetcodes (mostly easy with some mediums) per night for the past 4 months because I’m looking to switch in jan.”
- “practice to gain fluency and speed in your preferred programming language”
- “familiarize yourself with built in libraries / data structures that come up frequently in interviews”
- “If you are a senior at a reputable company then I don’t see why you would have to jump through all these hoops”
- people agree but many say this is the reality
- “google “most popular leet code problems” and work through them all it might make all the difference”
- “start slow. my first day i did literally 1 array problem, it took me like an hour. now im doing about 2-3 hours of leetcode a day, hoping to get it up to 4 this week. It does come back.”
- “take it slow with applications”
- “I’d recommend going through this list of problems, it has pretty good structure and was helpful as a starting point : https://www.teamblind.com/post/New-Year-Gift---Curated-List-of-Top-75-LeetCode-Questions-to-Save-Your-Time-OaM1orEU”
- “I’d recommend taking some PTO while studying”
- LeetCode Coding Interview Questions - YouTube
- Errichto’s channel
- 2 part on coursera : Algorithms - I & II by Bob Sedgewick
- Grokking the Coding Interview: Patterns for Coding Questions - Learn Interactively
Worldview
- Career is an important part of life worth devoting time to
- You should prove you’re qualified to do work by doing that work, not by solving a test that doesn’t resemble the work
- It doesn’t hurt to ask for what you want
- Job loyalty is not important
- Practice will make you better at a thing you want to be good at
- Dishonesty is justified when the situation you’re in is unjust
- Getting good at things is difficult
- Suffer now for a payoff later
- Others should not take shortcuts (but if they do, I can too)
- The shiniest thing isn’t always the best
- If you’re already proven, you shouldn’t have to go through the same “proving grounds” as everyone else
- Sometimes tests that purport to test skill actually test devotion
- We’re all in this together
- Check with others to see if your experience is unusual