3 ms·
You really need to decide in advance what you want to get out of LeetCode. It has a lot to give. For example, some LeetCode questions are textbook problems. Yo
by legerdemain 6y ago
You really need to decide in advance what you want to get out of LeetCode. It has a lot to give.
For example, some LeetCode questions are textbook problems. You really should familiarize yourself with them, but you will probably never see them verbatim on an interview. Other LeetCode questions are too tedious or time-consuming to do on a whiteboard in an hour. You will also not see them on an interview. For some people they can be fun brain-teasers, but if what you want from LeetCode is time-efficient prep material, you need to be able to tell apart these three kinds of questions.
If you look at comments on LeetCode questions, you will immediately discover that tons of people treat LeetCode as a pissing contest for its own sake. Should it matter that your solution runs in 18 milliseconds and theirs runs in 15? Or that they code-golfed theirs into 200 characters? Probably not. On the other hand, most canonical problems do have canonical solutions, and you should probably know what they are.
Knowing what to take from LeetCode and what to leave is almost its own discipline.
- dominotw 6y ago> Other LeetCode questions are too tedious or time-consuming to do on a whiteboard in an hour. Afaik all leetcode problems are from contest where thousands of ppl solve 4 in 1 hr. Its unlikely that there are questions which cannot be solved in 1 hr whiteboard.
- bradlys 6y agoLet’s hope they don’t upgrade the difficulty to that level. It’s already 2 in 45 minutes.
- dominotw 6y agoThey will have to soon. I think most ppl seem to hit that target pretty easily these days.
- legerdemain 6y agoNo, I stand by my claim that many LeetCode problems are too time-consuming or tedious to be effective whiteboard interview questions. It should be noted that whiteboard interviews are slightly similar, but not identical to IOI and other coding competitions. An IOI problem is not necessarily an effective interview question.
- Jaygles 6y agoI think a lot of people lump leetcode questions into one thing, when it can be as many things as one would like it to be. I like to do the easy questions to familiarize myself with a new language. There are certain questions that are math questions disguised as programming questions. I like to do those when I feel like brushing up my math knowledge. There are questions that test your knowledge on data structures. I like to do those if I want to learn that. There are questions that test your knowledge on algorithms. And there are questions that combine some or all of the above. How one uses leetcode or leetcode style questions is up to them. I think exploring the extremes of possible answers for the questions is a completely fine way to spend your time. And I also think there are several questions on leetcode that should be no where near an interview. But people aren't perfect and you often see those questions misapplied in an attempt to gauge skill.