creek567

i'm not asking how to do a for loop lol the queries are more complex, I was just providing an example for this thread since many of you are struggling to understand why chatgpt is useful.

you seem to have an emotional reaction against chatgpt, or are just really dense. that's okay for you. but I hope your team knows that you're limiting their career growth by having you as a manager.

the point is not the speed, but the brainspace. the brainspace I would have used on this task would have tired me out quicker and prevented me from making progress on other tasks.

ChatGPT is literally 0 brain space for these simple tasks. If you had to code it you're at least thinking about edge cases etc. Plus there's 0% chance it would take you 20 seconds for 10+ tasks of these per day. if you're coding at 50 wmp these would take you at least 1 minute to type out, let alone implement correctly.

by your logic you should never use google or SO because it's quicker to just implement it instead of opening a browser, typing the question, looking at responses etc.

I've been coding for 10+ years. If you're doing any serious coding day to day, you're likely doing these type of queries 10+ per day or more so over the day it saves a ton of time. You're not going to code this many functions bug free from your first try. If anything, you'll spend at least 30 secons on catching edge cases or off by one errors.

I'm not going to memorize random functions off the top of my head and I'm not going to waste brainspace on something I can use chatgpt really quickly and move on with others tasks more specific to my domain.

I'd rather focus and use energy on business logic + the part that are more specific to my domain than generic functions I can ask chatgpt and come back in a little bit.

for me chatgpt is 10x more efficient than searching stack overflow. I use it daily and helps speed my dev so much. It's super helpful for tedious stuff like date transforms (pst to utc) or random array filters (ex filter array of objects on this field and remove duplicates) etc.

My most recent query from yesterday ways "iterate over a nodejs array, the array has 10 or less elements. The increment should be in chunks of two. Stop when the index is bigger than 10, or when there are no more elements"

I can figure this stuff out myself too, but with chatgpt, I can query it and come back in 20 seconds and use whatever the output is. 95% of the time is correct, and the rest I can just quickly fix it myself. Plus i can ask follow on questions and refine it even more. This stuff would have taken me 5+ mins looking over stack overflow and then coding it and testing it. Plus ChatGpt handles edge case so I don't have to worry about them.

The efficiency is much much better than SO. I can't imagine going back to Google or SO for any coding questions. I only wish they kept the service up more during the day time. It's available in the morning or at night, but most afternoons it's a hit or miss.

Don't mind it at all. I work remotely so I really enjoy my current job, but this is why I'm thinking about going for FAANG:

1) My current company is a startup so things can go sour rather quickly. I want to keep my interviewing skills sharp in case I need to switch jobs.

2) FAANG is great for a career advancement. I'll learn a ton working for the best tech companies in the world and working with extremely smart people. Interesting technical problems and also upwards mobility later on. Also applying to any other job after that will be much easier as smaller companies don't screen nearly as hard as the big ones for their software positions.

3) Great for networking. You meet tons of other smart people who know tons of other smart people. In the Bay Area when you say you've worked for Google doors open much easier and you gain other people's respect much faster.

4) Lastly, FAANG companies will pay more than what I'm currently making.

Right yeah, I see this preparation as longer term and not something I can do in 2 weeks. Since I already have a job I enjoy, I'm not in a time or cash crunch so I can take my time.

I hope that it takes me 3~4 months to be prepared, but I guess I never plan on stopping practicing (doing LeetCode questions for example). I realize that interviewing is a skill that needs to be kept sharp throughout ones career, so even if I get rejected on the first try, I'll keep practicing and keep applying!

Thanks for the advice!

This sounds like a great advice!

Any specific tips on getting the most out of Leetcode?

For example. Should I do the questions on paper first, then the editor? Should I have multiple solutions to each (n2 and nlogn) if it exists?

How do you guard against just memorizing the questions? I feel like if i can't do a problem and look at the solution, then going back to it later will be useless since I already have memorized the answer but not the methodology to solve it.

Thanks!

Thanks this is great advice! > The average time my friends spent on this process was roughly 90 hours total

That seems much shorter than I had expected, considering there's so many questions on Leetcode. Do you recommend focussing only on the marked interview questions on LeetCode or start at the beginning and work my way up to the hardest?

I have never heard of leetcode. Mind expanding more on the process? Did you just do practice problems? Is there any reading around each question? Does it offer the optimal solution etc?

YES!

To be honest this should be a required course for most CS programs!

Way more useful than other theoretical classes that were required but only probably needed in grad school.

Software engineers (myself included) have this deep resentment for technical interviews, but they are part of a software developer life and the more comfortable we get doing them, the better off we are in long term!

Thanks! I was contacted by a recruiter couple years ago and they sent me the practice list, but it seemed super generic and intimidating so I never replied back.

I've heard really good things about CTCI so I'll pick that up. Having a Github checklist and a study plan would be super useful (I'm sure there's other people asking this question). I wonder if something like this exists already?