Comment by SpacePortKnight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SpacePortKnight | Hacker News Reader

SpacePortKnight

I am genuinely curious as to what makes leetcode harder than MSc? I am not sure if the hate received towards LC style interviews is justified. It levels the playing field and most companies ( except MAMAA ) picks a question from Blind 75 anyways.

On a personal note, I do believe LC has made me a better programmer. In my 3rd year of BTech, I was given a task to figure out splitwise (a bill splitting app) algorithm. I was quite proud to have written a modified version of Kruskal's which solved the problem. Last year, I saw the same problem on LC and it had a much cleaner and nicer solution to it. The solution opened up ways for me to think in different terms all together.

Similarly when I was in my 1st year, we used to play `Chain Reaction` a lot and I wanted to write a brute force A.I. for it. I had not been introduced to graphs, DFS or BFS algorithms. Hence, I had basically produced a recursion hell but working solution. Later when I had discovered DFS/BFS, I was ecstatic to say the least.

Thus, I believe LC helps/prepares/arms you with various techniques which you could leverage to solve certain problems in a more efficient (and also as a result, cleaner code) fashion.

I think a lot of the hate comes from a perception that its all about memorization, and that in turn comes from lack of experience with DS&A. There's absolutely a lot of BS, but I think in general as one currently grinding through it, its better than I first thought. Most of the common problem lists cover data structures and algorithms covered prominently in the algorithms book I read (Segewick). Moreover, I find that leetcode, despite its sometimes lowish quality, still provides the best platform to efficiently practice implementing basic algorithms. The Segewick book for instance provides numerous exercises in each chatper. But setting them up, running through them, getting feedback, seeing other implementations -- that would require tremendous amounts of time. Pairing it with leet code, you can quickly jump to exactly the thing you want to work on, get a variety of similar questions, and see competing solutions.

IMO, LC (and similar) aren't a bad choice for the interview process. The problem comes when it's used as a silver bullet solution. Most seniors that'll show up to an interview are probably working and simply don't have the time or will to grind LC.

Also, SWE is a highly movable profession, where being more than 5 years on the same place is unusual. So every ~5 years you have to polish your CV, grind LC and basically restart learning all computer science concepts you haven't used in those ~5 years, without feeling burnout or dismay.

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