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I almost interviewed for a FAANG company recently (they put a hiring freeze in before I could get in the interview) and they literally told me to grind "Leetcod
by throwaway2016a 4y ago
I almost interviewed for a FAANG company recently (they put a hiring freeze in before I could get in the interview) and they literally told me to grind "Leetcode Hard" problems to prepare. I have 20 years experience but the kind of problems that are "hard" on leetcode are a very different than what I have done day to day during that time.
I wish my degree and experience would speak for itself. But in reality it seems like exactly that... the degree doesn't matter.
Edit: Last time I mentioned it I got hammered by people in HN essentially telling me I must not be good enough. But having done a lot of interviews on the interviewer side, I can say pretty certainly that Leetcode skill is not directly correlated with Software Engineering skills.
- hnfong 4y agoI dabbled in competitive programming a bit (~20 years ago) and can confirm this. Since everyone was talking about leetcode recently, I went and did a couple questions there. Smart people with some CS background but without specific training can reasonably expect to find medium challenging but not impossible. Hard usually requires some specific knowledge of the tricks to do those types of questions -- and these tricks are rarely used outside of specific niches. Solving leetcode type problems are generally kind of fun for me (might be considered an "acquired taste"), but I don't believe all programmers/software engineers need to grind them to become good... I've personally never really applied those competitive programming skills in my 10+ years career (outside of interviewing...) Those who have done so are probably in the minority (and I suspect, probably over-engineered the solution a bit).