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> Are most SWE just mediocre at coding or is there just some fundamental difference between leet coding and the skills needed to be a SWE? At the risk of catch
by the_only_law 5y ago
> Are most SWE just mediocre at coding or is there just some fundamental difference between leet coding and the skills needed to be a SWE?
At the risk of catching a lot of shit for this, I’m going to say yes to both of those.
A large amount of software development jobs involves taking various components big or small, and gluing them together with business logic of varying complexity and then trying to figure out what’s going wrong when one of the components or glues fails. Pretty much every job I’ve had personally has ended up being call some API / Query some DB and perform business logic on the results. There are a LOT of jobs like this out there, and a lot of them pay pretty good, by anyones standards who’s not into the whole tech culture. You perform at these just fine without hardly any knowledge of implementing many data structures or optimal algorithms.
- twic 5y agoI agree entirely with both these points, although i would note that the space of unlike-leetcode work is larger than just gluing. I've spent a lot of time in my career clarifying user requirements, hunting problems in data, writing build scripts and test tools, laying out UIs, parsing weird file formats, etc. I have also sunk weeks on algorithmic problems much more complicated and less clear-cut than anything in leetcode!