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Don't forget about the people who don't have to spend weeks or months focused just on interview prep to do well on the average leetcode question... That's who

Don't forget about the people who don't have to spend weeks or months focused just on interview prep to do well on the average leetcode question... That's who interviewers are looking for. Now, a case can be made that there aren't that many of those people and you might not need them anyway, but... if you can spend a few weeks to catch up that's not all bad compared to what high-end job offers in other professions demand of your resume. The more we keep the interview process something demonstrable vs status/prestige/name-check/references, the better.

paulcole 3y ago
These jobs pay a lot of money. If you want one bad enough you’ll find the time to practice.
dinobones 3y ago
If you want to receive top compensation, and work at the Meta/Roblox/AirBnBs etc, you will need to be able to solve 2 Leetcode medium questions in 45 minutes, correctly and optimally. I work for a big tech company where people smell their own farts and think they are geniuses even though they work on CRUD interfaces for admin portals for Cloud. The interview process is well known. I have seen wrong solutions made by these genius question writers in their own doc, or where they find out 4 weeks later that the time complexity of their own solution is not really what they thhink it is. Do you really think in a company with 50k+ software engineers, where many studied English (but like to conduct CS interviews like they’re CS researchers), that everyone will know and understand details like; how the expected linear time complexity of quickselect works? It’s a nightmare; it’s blind leading the blind. It’s been completely gamified at this point and the only way to win is to play the game, maybe 10 years ago you could’ve passed on your own merit of having a CS degree and knowing basic DS&A, but I promise you that is almost the case nowhere anymore.
- lupire 3y ago
  I'm sure they exist, which is great, but I have never had a non-STEM shot on my dev team at any job. I'm sure you met a few flawed people like you describe. But they are not a large fraction.

paulcole 3y ago

These jobs pay a lot of money. If you want one bad enough you’ll find the time to practice.

dinobones 3y ago

If you want to receive top compensation, and work at the Meta/Roblox/AirBnBs etc, you will need to be able to solve 2 Leetcode medium questions in 45 minutes, correctly and optimally. I work for a big tech company where people smell their own farts and think they are geniuses even though they work on CRUD interfaces for admin portals for Cloud. The interview process is well known. I have seen wrong solutions made by these genius question writers in their own doc, or where they find out 4 weeks later that the time complexity of their own solution is not really what they thhink it is. Do you really think in a company with 50k+ software engineers, where many studied English (but like to conduct CS interviews like they’re CS researchers), that everyone will know and understand details like; how the expected linear time complexity of quickselect works? It’s a nightmare; it’s blind leading the blind. It’s been completely gamified at this point and the only way to win is to play the game, maybe 10 years ago you could’ve passed on your own merit of having a CS degree and knowing basic DS&A, but I promise you that is almost the case nowhere anymore.

lupire 3y ago
I'm sure they exist, which is great, but I have never had a non-STEM shot on my dev team at any job. I'm sure you met a few flawed people like you describe. But they are not a large fraction.