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Comment by MoonGhost | Hacker News Reader

Coding is actually a hard skill which requires practice. Regular litcoding for the sake of it should help. The problem with that is it takes the whole brain and breaks other thoughts chain. I'm thinking about to dedicate full days for small tasks like this.

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> Regular litcoding for the sake of it should help.

I got where I am without regular leetcoding. For me, regular leetcoding will only marginally improve my skills. And I definitely don't want to do regular leetcoding just to maintain my skills.

You know how many people love jogging outdoors but hate treadmills? Leetcoding is like treadmills. You may have to do it, but it sucks. Yes, some people love treadmills, but they're in the minority.

There’s two kinds of leetcoding. Leetcoding via memorization obviously sucks, but leetcoding by clicking next problem until you get one thats totally alien and then letting it mull in the back of the head for a few days to crack it without reference material is pretty fun

After being a professional programmer for ~20 years, and recently playing around with leetcode - my main issue with leetcode is that there's almost no overlap between leetcode problems and the problems I actually encounter in the wild. The validation tests often have silly corner cases that force you into a single answer to avoid timing out. It's frequently as much work to understand what the problem is actually asking you as it is to implement a solution. Just like I've found ChatGPT to be pretty mediocre at writing the sort of code I work on, but others swear by it, maybe some peoples' dayjob actually looks like writing leetcode all day? I know a lot of interviewers use it, but it feels so disconnected from actual engineering work.

My line of work (ML for medical imaging) is pretty dense with leetcodelikes, especially the classic “what’s the best time complexity? Great now whats the best space conplexity”

I'm working on sort of 'graph' library. It's litcoding all the way. There are many separate containers and algorithms. The problem to a) write them b) optimize for memory c) optimize for performance d) find a 'good' balance where 'good' is undefined. But it starts with architecture which is based one some estimates of achievable functionality/performance.

What if, like me, you hate both jogging outdoors and treadmills?

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