It's becoming obvious to me that my time is better spent learning to solve these riddles rather than actually becoming a better developer. I have a job search coming up at the end of the year and whilst I've managed to largely avoid companies that ask this type of question, I believe it's seriously constraining my career.<p>I can't speak for everyone but the whiteboard interview has prevented me from leaving jobs earlier, moving jobs more frequently and left me avoiding certain companies altogether.
Gosh, I don’t enjoy that there is so much competition in this space. I can’t compete against people who essentially seem to have no life or other interests than getting job at Big N (or enjoy competitive programming).<p>It feels like this culture has ramped up in the last 5-10 years. When I started interviewing, the questions were easier. It feels like they’ve gotten more difficult - or at least the answer the interviewer wants is less attainable.<p>And I feel like I know why - go look at the leetcode discussion forums. There’s almost always some post at the top saying, “I did 1000 problems and won’t stop. I got accepted/rejected and learned so much. Believe.” From the outside and inside, it looks like a cult. I feel like these folks are just making it worse for everyone.<p>Maybe I am just bitter because I’ve passed every mock interview I’ve done but I can’t get an offer from Big N still. Startups are the worst as a non-founder/non-executive.
I find this little sub-industry building up around, “the coding interview,” to be highly strange.<p>Where are the papers that correlate this niche, specialized skill to general job performance and productivity?<p>I get that at certain problem domains the asymptotic complexity becomes a baseline for performance so I’m not against testing people’s knowledge where it’s appropriate. But is it really the dominating skill?<p>Reading some of the comments of people who went through the pipeline of this cottage industry, it sounds like it’s not even useful after you get hired. In fact optimizing for it to get through the interview sounds like a bad idea! Imagine landing the job and having no other skills.<p>I’m curious how these algo expert/monster/crushing the interview businesses survive and perpetuate this highly competitive environment.
All the items are taken from Leetcode problems, but for the vast majority of them the author (labuladong) does not give attribution.<p>There should at least be a link to the related Leetcode problem for each section.
16+ years of experience and won several awards and designed multiple highly scalable systems in retail. Still cannot get into faang. These coding interviews gate keeping me..
Found in my bookmarks: <a href="https://leetfree.com/" rel="nofollow">https://leetfree.com/</a><p>Not sure if all quizzes are original, but some of them looks interesting.
Thanks for the write up and git book.<p>Related question: I’m curious if any has game-ified algorithm learning, sort of like those old educational math games targeting certain grade levels.<p>Might be cool to make a point and click adventure centered around dynamic programming or greedy algorithms.
I am a self taught programmer (python). I learned things because they required to solve some problem. You face problem and then you find solution. I used to solve puzzles in childhood for competative exams. But now as adult, it is very difficult to connect with imaginary problems which you never deal in day to day life. It makes me feel empty - learning something to just get a job. Recently I picked up interest in OS because I started to notice my limit with application programming. I learn to write comments and importance of git, after working in startup where you keep wearning thousdands of hats daily and forgot what code last week. And I feel this is very organic approach to learn.<p>Being on both sides of table, whenever I conduct interview I just ask simple programs to do (mostly fizbuz) and try to gauge candidate passion by understanding projects s/he worked and problems faced. If candidate passes fizbuz, I believe s/he has basic understanding of logic. Other things can be thought easily if candidate has passion.<p>I have friends in university who only talks about algos but can't write single line of code (I am not blaming them, it is just their field doesn't require intense coding. What i am trying to say here is, writing good code is like craft. You need to write actual code to excel in craft. Solving leetcode problem successfully doesn't imply you can write good code automatically). Last time when I switched jobs, I studied couple of algos and now I forgot them. I am again switching and thinking to start with leetcode. The biggest problem in industry is hype. These days even small stupid IT shops are asking for hackerrank test with full stack developer. Lot of focus is still on memorization and hype.
Thank you for your guide. I do apologize in advance, but this tutorial, like others, simply goes into the _what_ to do and doesn't explain the _why_.<p>Forever math will be about memorizing these "tricks" and not understanding it intuitively - can someone please help offer some suggestions to me?