Any deece CS program will include algorithms courses, but I don’t think they cover fundamentals in a way that lends themselves to some LC problems. For example, what academic course talks about sliding windows or two pointers? Those are more like competitive programming techniques. Academic algorithms classes more likely to make you do proofs and learn about the Master theorem. It’s not that you don’t solve algorithms problems in the classes but some LC problems seems to require methods that go beyond. #leetcode #interview
This is exactly the reason non-cs and cs grads have the same opportunities for sw engg positions
To pick up on a lot of interview/software terminology and demonstrate working knowledge you might need the coverage a degree provides. If somebody just leetcoded without getting absorbed with the field they wouldn’t understand a lot of terms. I experienced this before going back for a CS degree
My CS classes actually did help a ton, but that's mostly because I got my degree in 1997 and all courses were taught in C. There were no libraries, packages, etc to use, so everything like searches, tree traversals, linked lists, hashmaps, etc always had to be implemented by hand.
Respect
This is part of why I hate leetcode, BTW. As a professional, I've spent days and/or weeks building something that can now be easily Googled or downloaded. As a hiring manager, "Google" or "Package Manager" are almost always acceptable answers for me. I'm much more interested in why you're using a sparse tree than whether you can code random traversals yourself. When I started, writing software was like building Legos with just the basic 1x2, 2x2, and 2x4 blocks. Building complicated things out of basics was required everywhere. Now, it's more like you have every Lego available and the task is to figure out which of those specialized Legos to use and how to fit them together sensibly.
It’s a good thing that your cs degree doesn’t teach you how to do leetcode...
💯