How competent is the average CS grad?
I'm a Junior majoring in Finance who is recruiting for a summer internship this semester. I've done over 300 LC problems and have a couple of personal projects on my Github and am wondering how strong my peers in CS are. I keep seeing posts on Reddit saying candidates can't solve Fizzbuzz yet I do see quite a few of my CS peers working at FAANG. What would you say the average competency is and how strong am I compared to them? TLDR - Title
We all know the best CS grads become product managers
Yeah. No.
downvote
I would guess that 90% of the candidates I interview wouldn’t be able to solve a typical LC easy even if given unlimited hints and a full hour.
Does that make them incompetent though?
As much as I dislike LC I would actually say yes it makes them at least slightly incompetent. LC questions aren’t just problems that you were trained on specifically while in school. If you’re still in school / just out, you should be able to do them, especially the easy ones. It’s unfortunate for people who have been out of school for some time and haven’t had to deal with many of those problems for a long time who are the ones that suffer from this horrible interview style.
You don't really need to compare yourself to others in terms of interview performance. Can you successfully answer two Leetcode mediums with optimal solutions in about an hour? Communication is another aspect of this, but that's probably a better baseline.
An hour wouldn't cut it. In interview you have only 40min. Factoring in the need to communicate your thoughts during the interview, you should solve within 30-35min when practicing in silence.
I’ve met more incompetents in CS than engineering, BS and MS in non-CS engineering and working on CS, but tops in CS are intelligent af. I’ve never worked on a finance degree but the people I met in finance who went back for a CS degree are the most insufferable, putting in insane amounts of hours for an intro class and then acting like the class is easy. I’ve worked in software now a couple years and was getting unsolicited tutoring advice about how to use git by a finance guy lol
The FAANG represents top 5 % of developers in US. I would say outside of good schools, CS grads in bottom half are pretty bad.