Year+ is a fair assessment. A proper Computer Science course(4 years!) is mostly about algorithms. Most of leetcode hard would qualify as warmup exercises for my class.

That was a while ago. Right now? My brain is chock full of architectural stuff, k8s, several programming languages, multiple cloud provider idiosyncrasies, etc etc. Can I do leetcode? Yeah sure. Can I do it during an interview? I've tried recently, bombed spectacularly.

I'll probably have to invest the time prepping properly because there's little choice these days. Like you said, it's using up our precious free time. I'd rather be, I don't know, writing some stuff in Rust so I can add that language to my toolbox.

We had to solve binary and hex division and multiplication on paper for exams and study Dijkstra's algoritm and binary tree traversal in highschool CS. Ugly stuff for a bunch of 16 year olds who just wanted to make Flash games. Really made me hate CS.

This is not ... hard. It's the same logic as decimal multiplication/division on paper.

> study Dijkstra's algoritm and binary tree traversal in highschool CS

That's more like it!

Do you really think tests where you gotta solve several divisions and multiplications on paper in hex and binary with no aids under time pressure is approachable for every 11 year old who just starts to learn about CS?

It's good to learn and know how such operations are done, but those tests were the bane of my 11 year old childhood.

I was solving leetcode-adjacent problems for the entire last year of high school in preparation for the final exam though.