Comment by grumple | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grumple | Hacker News Reader

CLRS is over 1000 very dense pages. I assume the author just did a fairly casual reading and didn't work through many problems.

Even still, this is a full month of study just for the interview process, and little of this sticks unless you practice it. This basically says to me that big companies just want to hire new grads or people who have copious amounts of free time to waste on studying, or perhaps enough wealth and freedom to take several months off (someone I knew with several children and a dependent wife took 3 months off to prep for interviews and got multiple offers! But this is only possible if you are already wealthy because of the high risk involved and lack of income).

I'm not saying I haven't done an extensive amount of prep - I own 3 of the 4 mentioned books plus CTCI, though I've only read the latter and DDIA, and I just did advent of code 2020 - but I'm a man with a remote job and no children and it's still a pain for me to stay at my current level of being moderately competent at algorithms. And then, of course, you'll get into BigTech and spend time fiddling with frontend components or configuring infrastructure or gluing apis together and you'll never need any of this again - with the exception of the content of DDIA, which would be a much better focus for senior engineering interviews and you end up learning/using a lot of this in practice.

> CLRS is over 1000 very dense pages.

CLRS is in fact over 1000 pages, but it's not very dense, quite the opposite. It goes in painstaking detail about every single minutia you could possibly be thinking of, often formally proving things that everyone with even a modicum of mathematical education should be able to independently come up with a proof for (white path theorem, anyone?).

All of that is great for beginners (there's a reason it's a standard textbooks), but I remember that even when I was in school I found it a little too verbose and used to prefer the Sedgewick.

With that said, I still agree that the author's timetable is very optimistic.

> CLRS is over 1000 very dense pages. I assume the author just did a fairly casual reading and didn't work through many problems.

When I saw his day to day plan include things like chapters 22-26 of CLRS, I thought the same and casual might be an understatement unless he has read this book multiple times already.

DDIA was by far the preparation reading I've enjoyed the most. I'm currently reading it again. It is so eloquent and fun to read but other than just the fact that internalizing these topics to a level where one can feel comfortable discussing and reasoning about them, you can also use this book to navigate a deeper learning path through its many footnotes.

He also mentioned in his article:

> When studying CLRS or PP, it’s essential to solve the exercises at the end of each chapter. That will help you to solidify what you have learned into your brain.

That's what boggled my mind when I read this. There's no way that he read multiple chapters of CLRS a night and did all of the problems at the end of the chapter. I've done most of those exercises; some of them took a long while to get through.

I guess that's why I take issue with the advice that is given in the article. It is kind of unrealistic for any 30+ professional with a family, children, etc. to study this much for an interview.

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