Leetcode has taught me that I'm a bad engineer

Re:Leetcode has taught me that I'm a bad engineer by baq on Wednesday January 05, 2022 @03:00AM (#29806355)

In the industry computer science knowledge is useful on average once a month when you decide between a hash map or a vector. The hard part is figuring out what the customer actually wants.

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Re:Leetcode has taught me that I'm a bad engineer by josephg on Wednesday January 05, 2022 @03:32AM (#29806552)

> once a month

This is incredibly dependant on your company, team and role. I’ve been knee deep in data structures and algorithms for the last year. When I was at (FAANG) years ago I worked with people who did this stuff full time. You’ll find roles which use these skills in AI, AAA game dev, finance, operating systems and so on.

But probably 95% of commercial work is styling and wiring buttons. Even at big tech companies most of the work is plumbing. The skills you learn on leetcode are completely irrelevant in those roles.

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Re:Leetcode has taught me that I'm a bad engineer by giantg2 on Wednesday January 05, 2022 @07:37AM (#29808206)

Depends on where you are in finance. I work for a financial company an nobody I worked with was dedicated to algorithms. They seem to rather take the finance PhDs and teach them how to code rather than use developers for that stuff. The rest of us are just handling boring plumbing.

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Re:Leetcode has taught me that I'm a bad engineer by vanusa on Wednesday January 05, 2022 @11:03AM (#29810622)

But probably 95% of commercial work is styling and wiring buttons.

We're in agreement that algorithms as such probably make up about 5 percent of industry work.

But the other 95 percent -- and I am talking engineering work, not product desgn -- is definitely not simply "styling and wiring buttons". And this is a very myopic view to have.

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Re:Leetcode has taught me that I'm a bad engineer by llamajams on Wednesday January 05, 2022 @08:05AM (#29808377)

Yeah I don't know where y'all work, but data structures, algorithms, and design patterns are for breakfast lunch and dinner practically every day at my work. It wasn't so when I just started but as soon as I got out of a jr role all the problems has huge data sizes, things had do get done fast and all that so there's no escaping the fundamentals =\.

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