Should I grind LC then interview or just stay in Amazon?
Hi, I’m hopping to get some advice from here. I’m a mid-age woman, and have no plan to have kids. My plan is to work another 5 years or so, then see if I can retire. I have been in Amazon more than 6 years and have become more and more unhappy about my job and annoyed by the company/team culture. I attempted to make a change a couple of years ago, but I was terrible at leetcode, so it was a failure and I was miserable during that time, because I had to work to “meet the expectations” and leetcode at the same time, and my partner felt ignored. Recently I started to think about interview again and practiced on and off for almost a month, but all the practicing just made me realize how bad I’m at LC plus I heard nowadays interviews are much harder and more competitive. So I started to question the interview idea is practical at all, since practicing LC makes me feel bad about myself, also can take away my time from my partner, which can affect my relationship negatively. Should I just stay in Amazon and be abused for the next 5 years or I should seriously practice for LC and make a change? #tech #leetcode #interview #career
you should always keep grinding LC, even if you are NOT going out for interviews, it still feels good and keeps you confident. so either way, keep coding and keep shaping your brain everyday.
As I said, LC does not give me confidence, but destroys it, it makes me feel useless and reminds me how I disliked “data structure and algorithms” class when I was in school.
program managers usually dont write code. you can try that role if that makes you happy.
You say abused, is it how you feel? When you say bad at LC, what does that mean? Do you struggle with hards or mediums? Based on my experience, interviewing had become slightly more difficult, but not impossible. Additionally, if you are confident in your skills, and LC is the only issue, you could try some companies, which don't ask LC type of questions.
As you have read other posts about how Amazon did compensate review, there is no rewards if working hard because “stock will increase on its own”, but if not work hard, you will be in danger of getting piped. As I just resumed LC, I now still work on easy questions, but can’t get them right in one pass quickly. Last time when i practiced, I was able to do most medium but now I seem to have forgotten all of them! Which companies don’t require LC?
There is a 3rd option - you get laid off or pipped. You need to LC to mitigate that risk
TC or GTFO
Have kids
If you are bad at LC then right now it will be extremely hard to land a job that pays more than Amazon.
I often wonder if people who stay in Amazon more than 5 years, if not for visa reason, are probably bad at interviewing.
They/you had to have passed some kind of LC question though ... Not all questions to Amazon SDEs are behavioral LPs, unless this was the case 5+ years ago.