Don’t want to do Leetcode? Me neither — after I left Airbnb I vowed to not work at any company that asks this kind of question. I interviewed at a bunch of interesting companies (Airtable, Brex, Eaze, Figma, Lob, Notion, ...) none of which asked this kind of algo brain teaser question. There are tons of places out there with great product, interesting problems, and good compensation - so if you hate this bullshit, don’t give up.<p>I interview candidates every day, and my impression is that a candidate from FAANG/leetcode company is no better or worse than any other candidate.<p>Anywho, I’m hiring for a bunch of roles - full stack, Android, infra, SRE, early career, etc - if you’re interested in Notion (<a href="https://www.notion.so/careers" rel="nofollow">https://www.notion.so/careers</a>) ping me on Twitter @jitl.
You really need to decide in advance what you want to get out of LeetCode. It has a lot to give.<p>For example, some LeetCode questions are textbook problems. You really should familiarize yourself with them, but you will probably never see them verbatim on an interview. Other LeetCode questions are too tedious or time-consuming to do on a whiteboard in an hour. You will also not see them on an interview. For some people they can be fun brain-teasers, but if what you want from LeetCode is time-efficient prep material, you need to be able to tell apart these three kinds of questions.<p>If you look at comments on LeetCode questions, you will immediately discover that tons of people treat LeetCode as a pissing contest for its own sake. Should it matter that your solution runs in 18 milliseconds and theirs runs in 15? Or that they code-golfed theirs into 200 characters? Probably not. On the other hand, most canonical problems do have canonical solutions, and you should probably know what they are.<p>Knowing what to take from LeetCode and what to leave is almost its own discipline.
It's worth checking out the other links/blogs on this site. I read a lot of complaining about Leetcode, most of which I think is valid. That said, something that's not discussed often is its effect on interviewee's mental health.<p>I used to admin a large Discord server for junior software job hunters. It's pretty insane how many struggle from anxiety and stress directly caused by the interview formats popularized by Leetcode. The author here makes a pretty good point, honestly:<p>>Leetcode is a competitive programming platform at its core, not an interview platform.<p>I think this is where a lot of the stress comes from. Like the author, I mostly avoided Leetcode and focused on fundamentals (literally reading CLRS and implementing foundational algorithms).
I've recently been thinking about this a lot. The single highest-leverage action I've found for myself has been to shift my goal from:<p>A. (destination) I need to get a top-tier job at a FAANG company.<p>to<p>B. (process) I want to develop my ability to think structurally, so that I can enjoy spending time with code by honing an intuitive sense of the pattern language of code.<p>The former is future-oriented, stressful, feels overwhelming, triggers Imposter Syndrome and a sense of dread like crazy, etc. The latter is fun, joyful, centered in the present moment.<p>It's much more motivating and rewarding to get excited about developing a meta-skill than it is to try to hit your target total problem/contest numbers and then run a completely separate gauntlet of interviews after that.<p>If you want to be an Olympic athlete, you don't start from "I have to make these times, so that I can put myself in the highest pressure contest in the world." You start from "Man, I just really love (running|swimming|etc.)"
> We don't realize something important - Leetcode is a competitive programming platform at its core, not an interview platform. Yet, we fall into the trap of thinking it's an educational website.<p>There is a word circling China's Internet call "内卷", which can be translated directly to Involution, but on the ground it actually means "Over competition" or "Doing zero-sum competition". People trying to climb over the others while preventing others from climb over them, so they created many arbitrary obstacles to block others.<p>Keep in mind that, in Chinese society, 35 years old is equals to 70 years old (In many places, you cannot even get a gov job if you are over 35). Failing a competition can be really, life-changingly costly.<p>So, it is rather a "standard practice" for Chinese companies to keep throwing LeetCode questions to the interviewee during a job interview (, after all, many of those questions are marked by LeetCode as "Interview Questions"). This method creates a lot of benefits for the interviewer not only for the interview, but also for later negotiations.<p>Funny thing is, even though the top dogs in China got the best talented engineers in the entire nation, their public-facing products are still nothing but trash (or even fruaddy). And as for those engineers, many of them has their own big dreams, but they cannot realize it because the market is a highly restricted blood sea.
I wonder ten years from now how common LeetCode like interviews are. These types of interviews favor those who have the luxury of ample time to prep for difficult interviews and aren’t representative of most daily working environments. This process fails to consider candidates that would be good fits. When I help with interviews, I place much more values on communication skills, teamwork, mentorship, and a general passion for technology.
After crashing and burning the startup rodeo, I gave up. I live off my savings, dabble in crypto for some income, and work on my own software to sell. I've never been happier. Silicon Valley didn't seem to want me anyway.
Back in my uni times I remember helping out a few of my friends from CS course by doing pair programming with them (I myself was taking mechanical course, I was not good enough with math and physics to get a place in CS course). They was asking me how do I do this, that I sit down and start solving their problem like I knew the solution despite the fact I have seen each problem for the first time. I used to tell them, that if they cut through enough of problems they will be the same.<p>From the perspective of time I think there was one thing that I had and most of my CS friends did not - programming was my hobby and I loved everything related with computers, they only wanted the end result which was good money and stable job.<p>Would I do 1500 leetcode problems? Maybe when I was younger and had no commitments, but certainly not now.<p>From perspective of years I see that leetcode is quite far from what I do on daily basis, and I do write quite a lot of code.<p>If I went to the job interview and was given a problem I have never faced before I would want the interviewer to see me finding the solution and not giving memorized (or practiced) answer. If result was not great and interviewer decided I'm not fit for the role that's better outcome than to give false impression and then struggle (even if interview problem is nowhere close to what they do in daily basis).
IMO getting better at Leetcode problems is similar to getting better at mathematics and physics - you become familiar on a topic by doing problems on a daily basis, trying to wrap your mind around the concepts and at times doing a bit of drilling just to stamp the things that need to be memorized.<p>Both require you to be disciplined and dedicate time on a daily basis, otherwise you won’t get further.<p>Having the time to address this is absolute luxury to me. Only when I became relatively rich (I‘m coming from a poor background) could I consider learning Leetcode problems. Before that point, I was learning whatever earns me survival money.
When starting with Leetcode you face two questions:<p>1. Which ones should I do to be prepared?<p>2. For a given problem how do I find the knowledge that should have helped me recognise and solve it?<p>Imho, the Competitive Programmer’s Handbook [1] does answer these, every trick and pattern is explained in the most succinct way, in the order you would want to progress on leetcode to see all the basic problem formulations.
Afaik every random interview question would fit into one of these.<p>Let me know if you know a better one.<p>[1] <a href="https://cses.fi/book/book.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://cses.fi/book/book.pdf</a>
I honestly think leetcode is a pretty terrible way to learn how to do algorithm problems, especially without a formal education in algorithms. The large test case bank is the most useful feature. The discussion and solutions shared on the site tends to be lacking in breadth and depth.<p>I was happier to learn algorithms properly via the algorithms Coursera course taught by Sedgewick. The next time I need to go through the interview loop, I’ll probably start with Programming Interviews Exposed and supplement it with some other algorithm books as needed.
Ah, man, I get being anxious in interviews but it never occurred to me that newbies would be stressed out by their (lack of) Leetcode score. It's totally unnecessary of course - the people who've racked 1500 problems are probably as unemployed as you are :p
When everyone is a superhero, there will be no superhero. When everyone leetcodes, it is time to get back to fundamentals. So I agree with the author: grab a book, study fundamentals. Instead of memorizing 10 different dynamic programming problems, do study dynamic programming -- it's fun and it is useful in production code anyway. Instead of bitching about finding a shortest path of whatever criteria on a tree, do study backtracking. Instead of agonizing over how to build a LRU or a token bucket, build a LRU and a rate limiter. Instead of pulling your hair on implementing a concurrent queue, study The Art of Multiprocessor Programming. The list goes on and the process is fun.
I'm going through this now and it isn't leetcode anxiety, it's interview anxiety. If you haven't had that many great opportunities in your career, getting a FAANG interview feels like your one shot. And yes, in your rational mind you understand that it's just a job and you already have one so you aren't desperate, there are many other companies too, and there will probably be other chances to interview at the same company... but the anxiety is still real.
Alternatively just refuse to do leetcode "challenges". As a software engineer leetcode is barely related to what i actually do in my job. Anyone who thinks it is a good way of evaluating candidates is a clown.
I started doing leetcode when the pandemic hit. I wanted to be ready in case I got fired and I have to do an interview... surprisingly I fell in love with it. I am one of those ppl that writes codes in their head, so I just look at a problem and go on with my day until I have a solution. Then I write it and test it out.<p>It's enjoyable to me, and I have been forced to learn a lot of CS concepts I had forgotten and techniques I wasn't aware of.<p>I don't approach it with the drudge of performance, but just as something I do now. Like other things in my life, basketball practice, namely.<p>I am pretty sure eventually I'll be in a position I can breeze through an interview if I really wanted to, but that's not my goal anymore out of leetcode.
Great site. Spot on in terms of trying to tackle the problem of preparing in a more sane way, and countering the beliefs we have that we need to be able to do XYZ to get a job.<p>I think the reason that leetcode is so popular is because of so many software engineers underlying anxiety, sense of being unprepared, imposter syndrome. And when that’s already present, we look for solutions that flow into our emotional story. If I already believe I’m underprepared and that the goals I have are hard to achieve, I’m more likely to believe I need to solve 500 leetcode problems.<p>I help software engineers resolve your underlying interview anxiety and stress around things like interviewing and preparing. If this is you, come talk to us :)<p>tinyurl.com/happyhackers
Somewhat related: I have been recently looking for a new part-time project. In the past I have looked on freelancing sites for specifications, built demos, and usually within a certain number of days or weeks had a new client.<p>But those freelancing sites are horrible. So I decided to create an alternative. Just deployed it today. <a href="https://postaspec.com" rel="nofollow">https://postaspec.com</a>. Submitted as "Show HN", apparently not noticed by anyone in any way. Would be awesome to at least receive one comment about it.
OP doesn't seem to realize that leetcode questions are used verbatim by companies other than FAANG. Do you need to know how to solve leetcode questions? That depends whether you're going through the front door or the back door. If you're going through the front door, regardless of your experience level, you are going through the leetcode hazing process because that's what your interviewers did and they have no intention of having spent hundreds of hours doing work without a purpose.
You have given words to my lifelong struggle.<p>Honestly I have done great in every part of life except competitions.<p>During my school I always score good marks because there were only few books ,( to reach the bar ) , after that due to my issue with perfection, I have always put extra effort and I was successful . I had a very fulfilling schooling with great academic as well sporting results ( National Level Table tennis player) .<p>Then comes entrance exams . As a person who have always done well in tests , encountered a whole new world of competition. I started reading lot of books for the same subject , never satisfied , I had been a victim of maximum resources and minimum learning. Too be honest I never reached the bar to pass the entrance. Had I been focused on few resources I am sure the story would have been different.<p>I took engineering and again make the same mistake of maximization of resources and never reached the bar. Completed engineering , now comes the interviews , again made the same mistake. I had lost confidence in all my abilities and stopped applying for roles.<p>After few months I started freelancing and worked well with clients because there my maximum resources model worked. Now I have significant money to take 6 months off and really start from bottom at preparing interviews.<p>Hope it helps somebody.
That's funny, I got anxiety not because I mainly could not solve algorithms problems (looking at you, graphs) but also because I could not beat my colleagues or friends who started to play too.<p>I used to play heavily on CodeSignal, a similar website. They used to post daily challenges back then. But there, it wasn't about reaching the best time complexity or whatever: the number of characters was more important, like on Code Golf.<p>You first try to solve the problem and then you try to reduce your code to the minimum. The level of anxiety was starting to be really hard to handle and I'm happy I stopped playing this. Also, writing creative small codes won't help you when developing real softwares that much since most of the times, small codes or one liners are terrible in terms of time complexity or memory.<p>I learned a few tricks and a lot of things about how some languages work through this practice and by looking at people solutions but I'm pretty sure it would have been better to read some algorithms courses instead.
> Instead, pick a book or a course that teaches ~100 well represented problems. And don't pick a book or course that has only problems. Pick something that teaches you to think about them.<p>The site doesn't actually list any books or courses that do this. It just states that bouncing around is bad in <a href="https://leetcodetherapy.com/interview-prep-today" rel="nofollow">https://leetcodetherapy.com/interview-prep-today</a>, but it gives no specifics for the <i>right</i> way of doing it. Maybe the reason that guy is bouncing around is that there IS no resource that steps through "100 well represented problems."
> Leetcode and other websites have conditioned us to think that we need complication.<p>A paradox that's plagued me my whole career is that simple abstractions are less approachable than complex ones. Simple abstractions almost by definition create bubbles of private language, making it hard to use existing knowledge to bootstrap into new knowledge. Complex abstractions don't have this problem.<p>I don't think Leetcode has conditioned anyone to think they need complication. I think beginners just find complexity more tractable, at least at first. Grappling with it feels like learning and doing. Leetcode rode that wave to where it is today.
I agree that you only need to master 100, maybe 200, core questions then solving 1500 leetcode questions is only a time problem. However, most of candidates are not reaching or even closing to “master” level.<p>For example, given a question, can you <i>immediately</i> figure out the real problem you need to solve? What kind of algorithms and data structures look possible or useful for this question? Do you clearly understand the time complexity of each possible algorithm? Can you explain the solution quickly and clearly? What about other alternative solutions?
> Here's all you need - master 100 problems first, then slowly progress to maybe 200 more problems. Do it well, and you can crack several top companies.<p>Memoizing 300 questions isn’t easy
The author says on the site to focus on a 1-2 resources. I have gone through CTCI but it seems lacking on explanation. Any other BOOKS (not online) that are superior?
More and more tech companies are beginning to hire for soft skills as a main emphasis, with basic technical skills as a given. They're tending to intentionally NOT hire l337 folks, with a lot of emphasis on avoiding the "brilliant jerk." So, if you are personally interested in the work, willing to learn, and aren't a jerk, you'll probably go further than someone who has traveling salesman memorized in 8 languages.
What’s a good way to pickup CS skills in a well rounded manner outside of a CS degree?
Moving from Sysadmin to DevOps rolls and need to learn this stuff.
It was very similar ideas that led to me making algo-drills.<p><a href="https://github.com/travisjungroth/algo-drills" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/travisjungroth/algo-drills</a>