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Comment by Magmalgebra | Hacker News Reader

> I hate leetcode and that keeps me away from most of the job opportunities

Odds are that until you can get past this mindset, you will hit a similar wall in every career, it will just be less obvious to you that you're hitting it.

Success at most careers means a lot of tedious grinding out basic skills. If you're lucky you like the grinding, but that's rare.

And here's the important part - getting better at this stuff makes the job more fun, humans really like the feeling of mastery. My first 4 years in SWE were miserable because I had no CS background. But I ground really hard on textbooks and leetcode, every minute of which was uncomfortable, and now my career is awesome!

Maybe SWE isn't for you, but whatever you do, commit to the work.

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Maybe I’m not good at the basics, but as an ostensibly quite successful engineer, I have rarely had to do “the basics” at work, and I don’t see how leetcoding would improve my actual performance.

Leetcoding is basically testing how well you can cobble together solutions out of a decently large bag of tools. You run into other tools you have to cobble together as part of actual work, but you never have to memorize those particular tools.

So leetcoding becomes memorizing an arbitrary feeling set of tools that you never actually have to use in practice just in order to prove that you can cobble together solutions on the fly using the tools.

Certain personality types bristle at being told to memorize a large set of things for no practical reason. It feels subservient to do so.

Now if what you are really saying is that forcing yourself to feel subservient is required in a lot of careers in order to succeed, then yes totally :)

> You run into other tools you have to cobble together as part of actual work, but you never have to memorize those particular tools

The statement I like to use as an analogy to this one is:

"I don't need to know how to add or multiply numbers, calculators can do it"

This is true in a certain sense, but if you are numerate you know that speed with numbers allows you to do all kinds of quick checks that less numerate peers cannot. It's my experience that colleagues who don't get good at leetcode style problems don't actually understand the skills they've left on the table.

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