Complete failure at DP

New / Eng
Kishiug

New Eng

Kishiug
Sep 17, 2018 24 Comments

I’m getting incredibly depressed. I work at a startup where I make reasonable money (330k TC plus some illiquid equity that will hopefully become worth something one day) and I have 8 yoe, but I’m completely burned out and would like to leave for a better opportunity. Net worth is 1.2M all liquid at vanguard mostly achieved through very aggressive savings rather than stellar compensation, and I would like to fix that.

I have a CS master degree that I got with full grades, and in general I’m considered a good performer at my job, though not being FAANG the quality of the people is not too high in my opinion (me included).

I started a couple months ago refreshing my coding skills for interviewing using EPI and CTCI and some leetcode. While I tend to more or less get solutions involving data structures, except the most complicated ones in their category, especially around trees and graphs, I am a complete and utter failure when it comes to dynamic programming. After seeing a problem, I stare at it for an entire hour or two, don’t make any progress, then look at the solution and I can’t possibly understand how I could have arrived to that solution by myself. It’s just too damn difficult for my brain.

I seriously can’t even get one DP problem, especially the ones from EPI, they are completely impossible to me.

What do you think blind? Am I a moron who’ll never be able to get an offer from FAANG?

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TOP 24 Comments
  • Netflix
    uHdD41

    Go to company page Netflix

    uHdD41
    If you can't solve a simple multi-dimensional knapsack problem in 20 minutes on a whiteboard while I tap my foot impatiently you're literally human garbage who isn't fit to handle the truly tough every day problems like searching StackOverflow for weird IntelliJ build errors
    Sep 17, 2018 3
  • SkyRyse
    DjpP56

    SkyRyse

    DjpP56
    It probably took me several years to understand how to solve these problems. I tried, then gave up, several times. This year it finally clicked for me. I should mention that I'm usually good at problem solving and have worked at a FAANG company. Everyone has their weaknesses. Don't give up and keep working.
    Sep 17, 2018 0
  • IBM / Eng
    Leetcode

    Go to company page IBM Eng

    Leetcode
    You need a therapist. Your depression is affecting your problem solving which feeds the depression even more.
    Sep 17, 2018 0
  • Google / Eng
    snape

    Go to company page Google Eng

    snape
    I don't know what DP is. Literally. You don't need to know DP to get into fang...
    Sep 17, 2018 2
  • SAP
    Mqni53

    Go to company page SAP

    Mqni53
    EPI DP questions are hard. Start with the easy ones on leetcode with the DP tag!
    Sep 17, 2018 1
    • New
      Nooglerish

      New

      Nooglerish
      Actually they are medium. There are Hard ones from geeksforgeeks.com.
      Sep 18, 2018