Complete failure at DP
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?
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.
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
Come on dude, grow up, you probably have a knowledge gap in DP. I remeber when preparing for my PhD qualifying exam I could not solve DP questions first, and all I could think of was brute force, but it came to me eventually. I assume you took algorithms course in college, did you have similar problem with DP back then? Get back to solving easier textbook end of chapter exercises imo.
You need a therapist. Your depression is affecting your problem solving which feeds the depression even more.
I don't know what DP is. Literally. You don't need to know DP to get into fang...
What is EPI
I would assume you are not trolling. It’s “Elements of Programming Interviews”, pretty famous book for interview preparation.
What the heck is happening . If FBers, googlers and all the unicorns Leetcode, what should people like me do? Bleedcode? Come on guys. Give us a chance. Stop leeting!
Hmm. I've always found dp to be easy as compared to random array rotation like questions since the answers are so straightforward/elegant. I think the key is to identify the fact that smaller subunits of the problem can also be solved by the same approach. As usual, try try try till you succeed and start very easy and go higher in difficulty so you get the hang of it. All the best my friend! We all have our weaknesses and how we deal with them defines who we are :)
I could have written all that for myself, minus the total comp. DP is not the end of the world and ppl who know dp are not any better than u or i. We have our strengths, we will prevail.
EPI DP questions are hard. Start with the easy ones on leetcode with the DP tag!
Actually they are medium. There are Hard ones from geeksforgeeks.com.