Earlier preparing for a week was enough to clear the interviews, then it became one month and now with companies asking LC hard in phone screen it would be minimum of 6 months preparation to clear interviews. Let's admit it, the LC preparation is useless other than clearing interviews. Just like you are not supposed to write concurrency constructs by hand, you are not supposed to write these algorithms or data structures by hand anyway. Better to use an existing implementation that has been battle tested by multiple users rather than rolling out your own. So who benefits from all the brilliant software engineers grinding LC day in and day out? It's the companies like Google, Microsoft etc. But not in a way you think. With all these brilliant engineer now spending their spare time working on LeetCode, they don't have time to work on their own ideas. That means less startups competing with them in the future. Imagine Zuckerberg grinding LC in his spare time in Harvard, there won't be a Facebook that destroyed MySpace. This helps monopolies like Google solidify their positions even more strongly. As engineers we need to be aware of the opportunity cost while spending our limited time and energy on something as pointless as LC.
You are assuming everyone has to spend all their time Leetcoding to become good at interviews.
If anyone can solve an unseen LC hard in 15 minutes with no syntax errors, all edge cases covered and optimum space time efficiency, then they should not be wasting their brilliance on building some stupid Enterprise app but help solve humanity's most pressing problems.
Perfectly solving LC hard unseen in 15 minutes is brilliant? I think you need to recalibrate your definition of “brilliant”. At the end of the day, they are just coding challenges, not rocket science.
You got it fuckin right my dude. I hate leetcode. We're all bozos for continuing this charade.
If the smell of my coworkers is any indication, some of them don’t switch underwear either.
I heard somewhere Russia invented LC to mess US economy. In other news, LC is just a proxy to measure your probability of succeeding as a SWE in 45 minute interviews.
Leetcode is important. It shows that you can focus and actually get your skills to the level of perfection. Everything you need for the job is on StackOverflow anyway. Question is, can you stick to it, focus and achieve perfection. People, who do half ass work hate leetcode. They also never deliver anything awesome.
It proves you can prepare for an interview and know some trivia, that's about it.
Yes, but others are not even capable of that.
I think it’s a conspiracy between all the major tech companies to improve employee retention. If engineers didn’t have to spend 6+ months grinding leetcode to clear technical interviews, we’d all be easily job hopping every few years. Companies probably aren’t okay with this because they want stability. Also some people don’t want to do the leetcode grind so they stay at their current job for a long time even if they hate it. Just my 2 cents.
If you need 6 months to prepare, you’re probably not meant to get in to these companies, which makes it a good process.
The type of people who can cleared these kinds of trivia are those who had done competitive programming or topcoder since university. They spent more than 6 months. Those who got easy trivias and can solved them are definitely very lucky. Keep in mind that the interviewing circuit always changing. Back in MSFT era everybody loves Linked List. This is no longer the case nowadays...
I agree with you. 6 months? Depends on the company. You can get into Facebook uber Amazon with 3. Obviously luck plays a big factor. 6 months should give you a high confidence. I would generally say 300 leetcodes would give you a 90% chance of getting in to any FAANG. funny you say this. I was leetcoding a few months back. Got to 200 leetcodes. Interviews lined up. Then I stopped and started pursuing my own startup idea. Sticking with Amazon for now as its optimal for WLB, commute, comp and people.
Another way to think of this is who has that 6 months spare time to do leetcode? Young people just graduate without family, which is what FAANG wants. FAANG can’t say this explicitly but they filter it in this leetcode way.
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I think companies should ask questions relevant to their jobs. Why does a devops/sre need to clear a freakin leetcode hard question? They will never implement anything close to binary search at work. I don’t see SQL questions being asked for backend engineer role when half of the companies on this planet run on some RDB SQL.