LeetCode Easy is also demotivating
Just starting to prepare for interviews. I am filtering out Easy problems right now but some of them are so tricky and I can’t get to the solution of it. It demotivates me and I am not able to move to Medium problems Any advice/ motivation is highly appreciated. Tc- 200 YOE-10
If you solve all easy, you are good for 95% of the companies.
how about for snap
Same. Easy peasy. Or maybe I got lucky , ymmv
It takes time I can confirm. I wonder whether those googlers says they practiced 40 problems and get offers. Is it because they are geniuses or it only takes a normal cs grad to practice 40 problems. I don’t have a cs background so I had to practice 400
Following
Learn tricks , those are deterministic
Try a book, elements of programming interviews is a good one. This will walk you through different classes of problems and how to approach them.
I have got Cracking the coding interview
I have got Cracking the coding interview. I like it as it tells me the way to think about the problem. But I can’t see the optimal solution
My advice is to just dive directly into Medium problems. I actually recommend getting the LC Premium subscription because they provide in depth rundowns of solutions. I'm in the middle of doing interview prep and got a bit overwhelmed in doing LC medium, I'd often go through the solutions in depth that LC provides and learn as I go along. I wasn't sure how effective this was but then I recently sat down for a couple of tech interviews and was surprised at how easy it was to talk through the problem and give answers and even alternatives if I couldn't get to directly implementing the optimized solution. Remember, it's not guaranteed that you'll get the most optimized solution but something you learn from these LC solutions is why you would do certain methods over others.
It’s a gym. Whether you like it or not, just do it. Things will get better
Pick one topic at a time and try getting comfortable in it. General topics are array, queue, stack, tree ( inorder postorder, preorder) , graph( bfs, dfs, mst), back tracking, dynamic programming.
Don’t spend too much time banging your head on a wall if you can’t figure out the solution. Go to the solution and try to understand why it works
Practice more, it will pay off. I was very resistant to LC when I first failed on easies miserably. I had a mentor who pushed me for more practice. After 2-6 months depending on your background, you'll nail it eventually. From failing on easies, now I complete hards in sub 20 mins usually.