Today marks exactly 5 months since I started LC. I put 6-8 hours every single day, never missed a day during the 5 months (except 1 week I was sick). 270 questions, 170 of which medium. I can't solve a single unseen medium, can't even solve the ones I did before. I probably have a very low IQ or some shit. Anyone been in the same boat ? What the hell am I doing wrong ? 5 damn months... But I think that's it. I'm not destined for this career and I'm officially screwed. TC: college debt.
There’s something wrong here. 5 months, 6-8 hours a day? That’s 150 days * 7 = 1050 hours. You don’t do something for 1000 hours and not get good at it. You’re not utilizing your time properly. If you sit on a tennis court for 1000 hours swinging your racket but never try and hone your technique, challenge yourself, or think about your mistakes or try to improve, you’re not practicing tennis, you’re just an idiot swinging a racket. Are you taking notes? Are you developing strategies? Noting patterns you see or key words that might imply a specific way of solving a problem? What is your approach? Or do you just stare at the problem for 4 hours and then give up and look at the solution?
^^^this
'Or do you just stare at the problem for 4 hours and then give up and look at the solution?' . That's EXACTLY what happens for 80-90% of the questions, replace '4 hours' by 30 minutes
how many easy? 100? howd you do on those? you need to get back to basics and work up to medium. Dont move on until you’ve mastered 10, then 20, then 40 medium. 5 months sounds like a lot but you can waste all the time in the world and not learn anything if you’re studying the wrong way. All that said, you dont need to be an engineer. A lot of engineers have non technical bosses that did their MBA’s
80 easy, probably solved 25-30 of them on my own
Hey, I am really to sorry to hear that. It sounds like the situation sucks. It would be helpful to understand why you are stuck on the questions. Do you only use LC to study? Have you used other resources like "Cracking the coding interview"?
yes I only use LC. I have a hard time understanding solutions, and even after I understand how it works I find myself unable to apply the same techniques with new questions. I'm pretty good at all aspects of practical engineering (networking, backend dev), but I'm really suffering when it comes to algorithmic thinking
How are your basics, e.g recursion, control structure, and data structures knowledge? Are you trying to run before you can walk/crawl?
Well you might just not be a good algorithmic thinker, which is not a good indicator of how you’d perform on the job. If that were true, Google and similar companies would have 0 bad employees and that’s simply not true due to the existence of PIPs.
Wrong way to think, if you put in the work anyone can pass those interviews. When people say you are not a good something it’s simply an excuse! Op change your methods and study better!
yes, I'm absolutely not a good algorithmic thinker and i REALLY want to improve, but can't :(
Dude, instead of LC, why don’t you buy some books like ctci or elements of programming interview? Because there you can look the similar problems and you can easily identify the pattern. I feel LC is for persons who are going to switch jobs.
I felt like CTCI is very simplistic; I take a look at EPI from time to time. Do you recommend I stick to those 2 books ?
EPI is just enough.
I have gone through the exact same experience as you. My problem was that I was looking at solutions too quickly. Really try cracking the problem (like up to 1 hour) before you look at the solution. Then you really begin understanding the common underlying to problems (dp/recurstion/etc.). If course some problems you just need to memorize but generally try u understanding them. I failed LC easy/mediums but eventually got offers from Google and Microsoft with this grind. Of course, there us always luck in life, so even the best will fail at times.
How long did you practice?
And why you went to msft , just curious?
I agree with the comments above saying to switch up your studying habits. You need to attempt to solve it so you can understand what motivates the solution to the problem. Also, if you see the solution and don't completely understand it and then memorize it and move on and call that solving the problem, then you really didn't.
couldn't be the basics are lacking ?
If you don't know basic data structures and algorithms, it would be difficult to understand how to use them. Maybe check out algoexpert.io cuz I think there are videos explaining each problem + data structures and alg in depth so you can really understand it
It seems you have never studied computer science. I’ve seen good self-taught engineers, but it took years for them to get to that level. You are trying to get into complex high-competitive field. I suggest to start with something simple like freelance, for example upWork. Sometimes writing a web scrapper with nested loops is a challenge
I'm currently doing my masters in CS, but algorithms and data structures have always been my struggle
You can try to implement data structures by yourself. It helped me a lot to understand when I created most of Java data structures in Python.
Try starting from the basics. MIT CS course on YouTube.
My friend took 1yr and i also took 6months. That friend went google brain after so many rejections
how confident did u feel after 5 months ?
You never feel confident. Dunning kruger effect