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I'll probably get a lot of shit for this, but LeetCode. I've recently been furloughed, and I think that redundancies aren't too far away. There aren't many com

I'll probably get a lot of shit for this, but LeetCode. I've recently been furloughed, and I think that redundancies aren't too far away. There aren't many companies hiring in my area at the moment, and if I'm going to move it's going to be for a big company, so I'm dusting off the CV and am applying to some Big N companies. A recruiter recently reached out to me, and I've got an interview with one Big N company coming up soon, so am using my new-found free time to study and, at the very least, be a bit more employable at the end of this pandemic.

__s 6y ago
> I'll probably get a lot of shit for this, but LeetCode. Don't hate the player; hate the game. gl
CalRobert 6y ago
Can't imagine getting shit for studying up on what's likely to help you get a job. I'd be doing the same if I were in your situation (though if laid off I'm hoping to start my own thing).
why-el 6y ago
No sane person will hate on your studying, you are doing what you gotta do to survive, good luck out there friend.
typon 6y ago
I don't hate you I pity you. Applied for Big N jobs last year, had to study leetcode for 1 month and I hated my life. I was legit depressed. I was already so busy at work and coming home to do leetcode just killed all motivation and happiness in my life. Did well enough to get to on site interviews but didn't get a full time offer from any of them. Such is life :(
- dominotw 6y ago
  I used to hate leetcode with passion because i associated it with being a failure in career. I started leetcoding just for enjoyment and not for landing a FAANG job, when i had no interviews coming up. I started enjoying it a little bit and now i do it for "fun" and don't have an anatagonist realationship to it. Like someone said, once you overcome something you have keep overcoming it, so you can never be successful if your strategy is overcoming.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    It feels like studying for the SAT for me (something I also struggled really investing in). At least it’s more valuable than the SAT in the skills you develop. It can be really hard to motivate yourself to jump through hoops.
harshs08 6y ago
I would be doing the same thing if I was in your situation. Even though LeetCode is a grind, there's no way around it if you are targeting big companies. Good Luck!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
ddoolin 6y ago
I'm also doing a data structures and algorithms course, likely followed by what will be HackerRank and LeetCode. I really don't like it but what can you do?
christiansakai 6y ago
After 2 years of Leetcoding and jumping ships, I finally got a job in one of the big companies. Worth it.
droithomme 6y ago
Never heard of LeetCode. Is it one of these fad languages? What companies are looking to hire people who are exprets with 10 years experience with this language?
- droithomme 6y ago
  Oooh! Downvotes instead of answers. That is extremely helpful, thanks. So all the posts here about this BS are shills working for some marketing company pushing their shit. It's not anything real since today is the first time it's been mentioned here. Typical marketing Yale imbecile tactic is use robot army downvotes to make people who ask WTF is this seem like they are out of the loop. Reality is LeetCode is absolutely nothing and anyone associating themselves with this label is either a shill or an imbecile. Thanks! Very helpful. Flag away since truth is shit and propaganda is everything on ycombinator.
  - Infinitesimus 6y ago
    Your comment will likely get killed so let me throw you a life-line 1. It's likely you're getting downvotes because it's an easily google-able question: https://leetcode.com/ https://leetcode.com/ 2. " It's not anything real since today is the first time it's been mentioned here". easily proven to be untrue: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=site%3Aycombinator.com+%22leetcode%22 https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=site%3A... 3. You immediately responded to the downvotes with anger and insults, ensuring that no one will bother to engage. You're probably having a bad day but don't forget other people also are having shitty days and no one is helped by your behavior. 3. You've been here for long enough to know the rules. Keep things civil and assume positive intent wherever possible. Hope your day gets better ( call a friend, hotline, play a game, draw, whatever it is that you use as a healthy form of therapy)
    - droithomme 6y ago
      So a bunch of nonsense and no legit response. Neat. Thanks a bunch he responded sarcastically while rolling his eyes. No one has heard of your pet project.
gcheong 6y ago
I can't hate you for doing what you need to do to get another job, I hate that this it what interviewing has come to and the companies capitalizing off it.
- amznthrowaway5 6y ago
  "I hate that this it what interviewing has come to and the companies capitalizing off it." I for one am extremely grateful, although I think it would be even more fair if it was more like the SAT. Traditional interviews depend too much on status signaling and social connections.
scarface74 6y ago
I use to hate the idea of studying leetCode and I still refuse to do it. But then I realized how hypocritical I was being considering all of the time I’ve spent “grinding architecture and infrastructure”, reading white papers and studying videos on TOGAF so I could talk the talk on an “Enterprise Architect” or a “Digital Transformation Consultant”. But if I have to play a game to get the next salary upgrade after I top out as an IC in my local market (not the West Coast), that’s what I had to do. Who knows? I might end up working in consulting at AWS or Azure. But now, with the entire world economy screwed up, I don’t think now is the right time to make that kind of move. I’ll stick with being just a regular old Enterprise Developer/Architect/Team Lead/Single Responsible Individual depending on how the wind blows focusing on healthcare.
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  it can be a fun game, and it is a useful game. brushing up on fundamentals is useful in any human endeavor no matter how advanced you get.
- grumpy8 6y ago
  don't need to do leetCode just for the salary game, there are some really fun algorithms
  - scarface74 6y ago
    After programming in assembly for hobby for six years in middle and high school, 4 years in college, and professionally for almost 25, nothing about software development is “fun”. It’s just a way for money to appear in my bank account. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike software development, but every hour of continuous learning I do is a combination of keeping me competitive at my current level or to make more money depending on where I am in life.
- crimsonalucard 6y ago
  Architecture is way easier than algorithms. I'm actually the opposite. I hate the idea that people are studying intensely for architecture because it just takes reading the wikipedia summary to get the main point. Architects are usually just managers who are ex-engineers and have been out of the front lines for so long that they aren't technical enough to get back into coding. This is fine, but the idea that "architecture" is some kind of talent is absurd. Anyone can study a blog article about the latest architecture buzzword and understand the concepts front to back. Not to mention that the more physical nature of architecture makes it less flexible than code itself so "architectural" patterns are, as a result, significantly less abstract and complex than coding patterns/algorithms. The true difference in ability is measured by who can actually Build an architecture, and usually its developers who build it, while architects (mostly) just talk about it.
senderista 6y ago
I hate to say it, but I got no discernible advantage from my non-trivial coding projects during my last job search. My time would have been far better spent just grinding leetcode, from a purely economic perspective. I wouldn’t have had nearly as much fun, but I probably would have gotten more offers.
- returningfory 6y ago
  100% percent my experience too. In the last 3 months I've been on-site at 3 of the FAANG companies. Not a single interviewer brought up the large personal projects I've done and which are given decent space on my resume; my weeks of leetcoding was definitely far far far more beneficial for getting a job.
  - shitoujizu 6y ago
    sometimes feels very sad about this since one's value should be reflected by the awesome projects he has done. I think it's just laziness of the FAANG companies. If the interviewer is well prepared and keeps digging the resume, then he should know the candidate is good or not. But by leetcoding, it's simpler for them, just keep asking the repeated questions.
    - dominotw 6y ago
      they look at your resume in any seriousness after you pass leetcode rounds,
    - glouwbug 6y ago
      From my personal experience, a company wants a "yes man", someone who will do as they command. From their perspective, if you can't pass (or refuse!) the coding challenge, you're already in the red flag zone. That's just how it is. The funny thing is that a single fairly large personal project will develop your engineering skills 42 times that of the hundred something leetcode problems you solved for your FAANG interviews. One teaches deep long term critical thinking. The other short term critical thinking. You won't see any small short sighted systems out in the real world.
mrslave 6y ago
On LeetCode, how would you estimate the split between slogging-enldlessly-at-things-I-already-know and I-actually-learned-something? I had never heard of it until I read the thread under your comment so I apologize if this is obvious to people in the know. From the comments it sounds like more of the former and less of the latter. I had a good experience with Project Euler back in the day (account long since lost). There was absolutely no focus on immediate employability but there were improvements in my "human capital".
- brudgers 6y ago
  Leetcode problems can be solved by extrapolation from FizzBuzz programming. They can also be solved by engineering insight of algorithms and data structures that are applicable to processes that don’t fit in RAM. That’s what makes Leetcode plausibly useful for evaluating candidates. Bad engineering will get correct output and good engineering is possible. Neither requires significantly more effort writing code.
kbrisso 6y ago
Good luck! I'm doing the same thing, I actually enjoy some of it, I've learned a few things too.
brandmeyer 6y ago
Back when I was preparing to apply to a FAANG, I built a game engine as my vehicle for practice. From scratch. Well almost from scratch, if you consider bare nekkid OpenGL to still be "from scratch". There's tons of opportunities in a game engine for exercising and honing your performance chops and your algorithm chops. It also gave me an opportunity to learn a new language and programming model - the GL shader language. Building it onto a game helps to keep it real. Best of luck.
- ronyfadel 6y ago
  I’m not too sure about algorithms? You can get away with making a working, performant (basic) engine with some neat functionality nowadays without delving too deep into algorithms or using any advanced data structures. It is a good exercise in “real coding” though.
  - brandmeyer 6y ago
    Off the top of my head, there's pathfinding on a navigation mesh, mouse hit-testing and FOV pruning with a space partitioning tree, triangle mesh sorting. You can also do some agent work by building up an automated opponent.
non-entity 6y ago
I guess its something I'll get good at if I practice it more, but at I cant even really do leetcode easy right node despite having been a professional developer for a few years and a hobbyist for long before that. I have no C.S. background though. Most of the times when I end up seeing the solution ot makes sense, but uses data structures in ways I wouldn't think. Part of the reason for that I think is because my daily work for one operates on much different types of data (business entities vs arbitrary collections of integers) and also because the logic in the applications I work on is not very algorithm heavy. Another reason is because of high level abstractions I've been spoiled by. I could probably hack many of the problems together with LINQ but that's not gonna hold up very well.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
DeathArrow 6y ago
I did some Leetcode type stuff in high school to prepare for CS contests and at University for some CS courses. I think they are ok if you like that kind of stuff and like to find solutions to those kind of problems. And if you have time. Most people who hate them are grinding leetcode kind of stuff in limited time, taking away from sleep, time with family, time for rest. If something starts feeling like a chore, maybe you are doing it the wrong way or at the wrong time. Also, from being employable point of view, I think there are more valuable skills. I.e. if you want to work as a web developer, know a framework by heart, master a web programming language, know SQL, know HTML, CSS and JS, know some useful patterns, know about testing, SOLID, DDD, TDD, know how to use tools like GIT, JIRA, Jenkins, Docker, know REST/SOAP/gRPC, know async and parallel programming. Those were the kind of technical questions I was asked about 3 months ago when I went through 20+ job interviews. From all those only one asked a leetcode kind of question. It wasn't hard and it didn't seem like it was a make it or break it kind of question. Many years ago, when I applied for game development jobs, I was asked about Unity, C#, GPU shaders and a bit of algebra and geometry, no question was leetcode like.

__s 6y ago

> I'll probably get a lot of shit for this, but LeetCode. Don't hate the player; hate the game. gl

CalRobert 6y ago

Can't imagine getting shit for studying up on what's likely to help you get a job. I'd be doing the same if I were in your situation (though if laid off I'm hoping to start my own thing).

why-el 6y ago

No sane person will hate on your studying, you are doing what you gotta do to survive, good luck out there friend.

typon 6y ago

I don't hate you I pity you. Applied for Big N jobs last year, had to study leetcode for 1 month and I hated my life. I was legit depressed. I was already so busy at work and coming home to do leetcode just killed all motivation and happiness in my life. Did well enough to get to on site interviews but didn't get a full time offer from any of them. Such is life :(

dominotw 6y ago
I used to hate leetcode with passion because i associated it with being a failure in career. I started leetcoding just for enjoyment and not for landing a FAANG job, when i had no interviews coming up. I started enjoying it a little bit and now i do it for "fun" and don't have an anatagonist realationship to it. Like someone said, once you overcome something you have keep overcoming it, so you can never be successful if your strategy is overcoming.
- fossuser 6y ago
  It feels like studying for the SAT for me (something I also struggled really investing in). At least it’s more valuable than the SAT in the skills you develop. It can be really hard to motivate yourself to jump through hoops.

harshs08 6y ago

I would be doing the same thing if I was in your situation. Even though LeetCode is a grind, there's no way around it if you are targeting big companies. Good Luck!

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

ddoolin 6y ago

I'm also doing a data structures and algorithms course, likely followed by what will be HackerRank and LeetCode. I really don't like it but what can you do?

christiansakai 6y ago

After 2 years of Leetcoding and jumping ships, I finally got a job in one of the big companies. Worth it.

droithomme 6y ago

Never heard of LeetCode. Is it one of these fad languages? What companies are looking to hire people who are exprets with 10 years experience with this language?

droithomme 6y ago
Oooh! Downvotes instead of answers. That is extremely helpful, thanks. So all the posts here about this BS are shills working for some marketing company pushing their shit. It's not anything real since today is the first time it's been mentioned here. Typical marketing Yale imbecile tactic is use robot army downvotes to make people who ask WTF is this seem like they are out of the loop. Reality is LeetCode is absolutely nothing and anyone associating themselves with this label is either a shill or an imbecile. Thanks! Very helpful. Flag away since truth is shit and propaganda is everything on ycombinator.
- Infinitesimus 6y ago
  Your comment will likely get killed so let me throw you a life-line 1. It's likely you're getting downvotes because it's an easily google-able question: https://leetcode.com/ https://leetcode.com/ 2. " It's not anything real since today is the first time it's been mentioned here". easily proven to be untrue: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=site%3Aycombinator.com+%22leetcode%22 https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=site%3A... 3. You immediately responded to the downvotes with anger and insults, ensuring that no one will bother to engage. You're probably having a bad day but don't forget other people also are having shitty days and no one is helped by your behavior. 3. You've been here for long enough to know the rules. Keep things civil and assume positive intent wherever possible. Hope your day gets better ( call a friend, hotline, play a game, draw, whatever it is that you use as a healthy form of therapy)
  - droithomme 6y ago
    So a bunch of nonsense and no legit response. Neat. Thanks a bunch he responded sarcastically while rolling his eyes. No one has heard of your pet project.

gcheong 6y ago

I can't hate you for doing what you need to do to get another job, I hate that this it what interviewing has come to and the companies capitalizing off it.

amznthrowaway5 6y ago
"I hate that this it what interviewing has come to and the companies capitalizing off it." I for one am extremely grateful, although I think it would be even more fair if it was more like the SAT. Traditional interviews depend too much on status signaling and social connections.

scarface74 6y ago

I use to hate the idea of studying leetCode and I still refuse to do it. But then I realized how hypocritical I was being considering all of the time I’ve spent “grinding architecture and infrastructure”, reading white papers and studying videos on TOGAF so I could talk the talk on an “Enterprise Architect” or a “Digital Transformation Consultant”. But if I have to play a game to get the next salary upgrade after I top out as an IC in my local market (not the West Coast), that’s what I had to do. Who knows? I might end up working in consulting at AWS or Azure. But now, with the entire world economy screwed up, I don’t think now is the right time to make that kind of move. I’ll stick with being just a regular old Enterprise Developer/Architect/Team Lead/Single Responsible Individual depending on how the wind blows focusing on healthcare.

gameswithgo 6y ago
it can be a fun game, and it is a useful game. brushing up on fundamentals is useful in any human endeavor no matter how advanced you get.
grumpy8 6y ago
don't need to do leetCode just for the salary game, there are some really fun algorithms
- scarface74 6y ago
  After programming in assembly for hobby for six years in middle and high school, 4 years in college, and professionally for almost 25, nothing about software development is “fun”. It’s just a way for money to appear in my bank account. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike software development, but every hour of continuous learning I do is a combination of keeping me competitive at my current level or to make more money depending on where I am in life.
crimsonalucard 6y ago
Architecture is way easier than algorithms. I'm actually the opposite. I hate the idea that people are studying intensely for architecture because it just takes reading the wikipedia summary to get the main point. Architects are usually just managers who are ex-engineers and have been out of the front lines for so long that they aren't technical enough to get back into coding. This is fine, but the idea that "architecture" is some kind of talent is absurd. Anyone can study a blog article about the latest architecture buzzword and understand the concepts front to back. Not to mention that the more physical nature of architecture makes it less flexible than code itself so "architectural" patterns are, as a result, significantly less abstract and complex than coding patterns/algorithms. The true difference in ability is measured by who can actually Build an architecture, and usually its developers who build it, while architects (mostly) just talk about it.

senderista 6y ago

I hate to say it, but I got no discernible advantage from my non-trivial coding projects during my last job search. My time would have been far better spent just grinding leetcode, from a purely economic perspective. I wouldn’t have had nearly as much fun, but I probably would have gotten more offers.

returningfory 6y ago
100% percent my experience too. In the last 3 months I've been on-site at 3 of the FAANG companies. Not a single interviewer brought up the large personal projects I've done and which are given decent space on my resume; my weeks of leetcoding was definitely far far far more beneficial for getting a job.
- shitoujizu 6y ago
  sometimes feels very sad about this since one's value should be reflected by the awesome projects he has done. I think it's just laziness of the FAANG companies. If the interviewer is well prepared and keeps digging the resume, then he should know the candidate is good or not. But by leetcoding, it's simpler for them, just keep asking the repeated questions.
  - dominotw 6y ago
    they look at your resume in any seriousness after you pass leetcode rounds,
  - glouwbug 6y ago
    From my personal experience, a company wants a "yes man", someone who will do as they command. From their perspective, if you can't pass (or refuse!) the coding challenge, you're already in the red flag zone. That's just how it is. The funny thing is that a single fairly large personal project will develop your engineering skills 42 times that of the hundred something leetcode problems you solved for your FAANG interviews. One teaches deep long term critical thinking. The other short term critical thinking. You won't see any small short sighted systems out in the real world.

mrslave 6y ago

On LeetCode, how would you estimate the split between slogging-enldlessly-at-things-I-already-know and I-actually-learned-something? I had never heard of it until I read the thread under your comment so I apologize if this is obvious to people in the know. From the comments it sounds like more of the former and less of the latter. I had a good experience with Project Euler back in the day (account long since lost). There was absolutely no focus on immediate employability but there were improvements in my "human capital".

brudgers 6y ago
Leetcode problems can be solved by extrapolation from FizzBuzz programming. They can also be solved by engineering insight of algorithms and data structures that are applicable to processes that don’t fit in RAM. That’s what makes Leetcode plausibly useful for evaluating candidates. Bad engineering will get correct output and good engineering is possible. Neither requires significantly more effort writing code.

kbrisso 6y ago

Good luck! I'm doing the same thing, I actually enjoy some of it, I've learned a few things too.

brandmeyer 6y ago

Back when I was preparing to apply to a FAANG, I built a game engine as my vehicle for practice. From scratch. Well almost from scratch, if you consider bare nekkid OpenGL to still be "from scratch". There's tons of opportunities in a game engine for exercising and honing your performance chops and your algorithm chops. It also gave me an opportunity to learn a new language and programming model - the GL shader language. Building it onto a game helps to keep it real. Best of luck.

ronyfadel 6y ago
I’m not too sure about algorithms? You can get away with making a working, performant (basic) engine with some neat functionality nowadays without delving too deep into algorithms or using any advanced data structures. It is a good exercise in “real coding” though.
- brandmeyer 6y ago
  Off the top of my head, there's pathfinding on a navigation mesh, mouse hit-testing and FOV pruning with a space partitioning tree, triangle mesh sorting. You can also do some agent work by building up an automated opponent.

non-entity 6y ago

I guess its something I'll get good at if I practice it more, but at I cant even really do leetcode easy right node despite having been a professional developer for a few years and a hobbyist for long before that. I have no C.S. background though. Most of the times when I end up seeing the solution ot makes sense, but uses data structures in ways I wouldn't think. Part of the reason for that I think is because my daily work for one operates on much different types of data (business entities vs arbitrary collections of integers) and also because the logic in the applications I work on is not very algorithm heavy. Another reason is because of high level abstractions I've been spoiled by. I could probably hack many of the problems together with LINQ but that's not gonna hold up very well.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

DeathArrow 6y ago

I did some Leetcode type stuff in high school to prepare for CS contests and at University for some CS courses. I think they are ok if you like that kind of stuff and like to find solutions to those kind of problems. And if you have time. Most people who hate them are grinding leetcode kind of stuff in limited time, taking away from sleep, time with family, time for rest. If something starts feeling like a chore, maybe you are doing it the wrong way or at the wrong time. Also, from being employable point of view, I think there are more valuable skills. I.e. if you want to work as a web developer, know a framework by heart, master a web programming language, know SQL, know HTML, CSS and JS, know some useful patterns, know about testing, SOLID, DDD, TDD, know how to use tools like GIT, JIRA, Jenkins, Docker, know REST/SOAP/gRPC, know async and parallel programming. Those were the kind of technical questions I was asked about 3 months ago when I went through 20+ job interviews. From all those only one asked a leetcode kind of question. It wasn't hard and it didn't seem like it was a make it or break it kind of question. Many years ago, when I applied for game development jobs, I was asked about Unity, C#, GPU shaders and a bit of algebra and geometry, no question was leetcode like.