Fattestmoron

Pretty much sums up how the hiring process is a gamble. So if you don't like somebody and they could be an asset to the company you would not hire them?

   I was given problems that I hadn't encountered before, but I was able to solve them by deduction/critical thinking and applying the appropriate algorithms/patterns. Often the easy solution and the optimal solution weren't even that different, and just involved using a hashtable.

I think most candidates could give a solution, just not while they are being treated like sardines and prodded with a stick.

It has made me ask myself: do I really want a job at FAANG, or any high level company? I mean if it's pumping out leetcode while simultaneously dealing with office politics and sadistic managers, I think I'll just go back to selling cocaine.

  The more experience I have the harder they are for me to solve, as engineering problems tend to have very different mental models to reach the solution.

It immediately made him uncomfortable and I didn't get the job, because he didn't like the tortoise and hare solution not being as "tractable" as the set solution.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

You need the pocket Dijkstra, Kruskals, Union-find, Bellman-Ford, KMP, Kadanes (sliding window), LCS, DP (1-n dimensional), Topological Sorting, NP-hard heuristics (usually DP), BFS, DFS, Backtracking, Memoization (basically DP, but usually used in DFS), Prefix sums (DP as well), that weird palindrome-specific algorithm I can't remember, binary search, bisection (numerical anaylsis ftw!)

You also need tries, heaps, red-black trees, B-trees, DAGs, priority queues (heaps)

But wait.. there's more!

Euclidean algorithm, Josephus Problem, Sieve of Erastosthenes and all the number theory bullshit I can't remember and refuse to, because it has fuck all to do with daily engineering.

Easy problems literally mean jack and I don't even think 50 medium problems could span all of the possible topics.

Sounds like you got in when it was easier.

Clearly thinking on your feet in front of people is what it means to be good at ones profession.

I also find it unbearable to "solve" something I see the solution to, or can describe how to solve it. In fact, if I see the solution, I find myself unable to go through the steps to actually do it, especially if there is a time constraint involved.

The trick you have described was my way to do the problems in my spare time back when I hadn't seen them before, but the whole problem is that leetcode problems are designed for an incredibly narrow range of solutions.

Analytical solutions that have poor worst case run times, but incredibly good average case run times are not allowed and a lot of mathematical approaches involving matrices and exploiting vectorization aren't allowed either.

Leetcode-style problems force you to put your mind in a very narrow box and I simply can't do that. I've always had a very great need of orthogonalization in how I think and operate; i.e. if something doesn't stimulate me enough, I need another concurrent activity that is completely different to keep me motivated.

The science degree was useful for when I did advanced math, before the finance industry figured it would just abandon complex math in favor of statistical learning.