> 1. Do you work hard (i.e a person who studies many problems, memorizes solutions, and regurgitates then) This isn't working hard. And you are competing with

> 1. Do you work hard (i.e a person who studies many problems, memorizes solutions, and regurgitates then) This isn't working hard. And you are competing with the people that are working smart. Such as people having a separate computer/screen to either look up the answer to a problem or ask an LLM to regurgitate some code you can transcribe. It selects for people that are dishonest. > 2. Are you smart (i.e a person who doesn't do any leetcode but knows the fundamentals and can sythesize past knowledge well enough to answer a new question) See above. A lot of the problems have nothing to do with real world coding scenarios. Do I need to pull out memoization and know how to work with grammar rules off the top of my head? Or the functionality of quad trees and how it applies to partitioning? No; I've literally never used them in my career and likely never will. What I do need as a software engineer is understanding the high level concepts and when to apply them and refresh myself on the use case when and if appropriate.