Leetcode has taught me that I'm a bad engineer

Re:Leetcode has taught me that I'm a bad engineer by josephg on Wednesday January 05, 2022 @04:06AM (#29806788)

Does grinding for months even work? The point of this post (and others like it) is that you can spend years doing leetcode without getting better. In comparison, I score far below most of my peers on conscientiousness but I find leetcode style problems easy. I'm a terrible hire in lots of roles because most companies' problems are boring. I have a history of getting bored and quitting. But I sail through these interviews.

If conscientiousness is what companies are going for, I think they're still interviewing wrong.

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Re:Leetcode has taught me that I'm a bad engineer by VRay on Wednesday January 05, 2022 @04:53AM (#29807104)

I think it works to some extent. There's a limit to how much you can get out of yourself, and a lot of dumb luck involved in getting interviewers who are actually reasonable.

In my case, when I grind those dumb problems I quickly go from needing 45+ minutes to implement a working sort function with file I/o to banging it out in 5-10 minutes. I dunno if I'd ever get good enough at those problems to make it into Google unless I got lucky, but I've gotten offers from the other FAANGs over the years

The whole thing is pointless, though. If a junior engineer asked me for advice, I'd tell him to get whatever job he can and work on saving money/building a startup in his spare time.

Grinding for months to get into Google is so soul crushing, and working for any big company is just awful in the long run compared to being independent

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Re:Leetcode has taught me that I'm a bad engineer by roland35 on Wednesday January 05, 2022 @07:21AM (#29808078)

I think leetcode is just like anything else you practice - in order to actually improve you need to practice the right way (or in the OP's case, with the right state of mind! Being burnt out is a fundamental problem which needs to be fixed first!)

I started out thinking I was pretty smart but got blasted by a fairly simple question on my first screening interview. I started looking at random leetcode questions but that didn't really work - I soon figured out that I needed to learn the concepts one at a time. I think that is the way to do it, get a list of general topics, learn about it, then practice just those questions until it clicks.

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