Why LC?
This is not a troll question. I genuinely want to know... Why is LC the most popular interview practice site? There are several other similar ones, hackerrank, geekforgeek, careercup, just to name a few. So why do we only hear LC here? It is merely blinders preference, or is there more to it? #leetcode
LC consists of interview questions with a good user interface to solve problems and also view the most voted solutions
Hacker rank has a great I terrace too, with online unitests and corner case evals. What's special in LC interface?
Hacker rank is wordy, lc is straight to the point
2 out of 4 questions at onsite came from LC
Some google HC’s will literally pick a med/hard from leetcode and change it slightly before giving it to the interviewee
Yes I heard a few.
Originally all the online judges were based on stdin and stdout. This made questions language agnostic and came from competitive programming. This is fine but requires wasted effort to do boilerplate I/O processing. Leetcode was one of the first to abstract away the I/O by supporting popular languages one by one - letting people focus on the actual problem. Now a ton of sites do this, but leetcode was the first that I can remember.
Makes sense. Thanks
Others are focused more towards competitive programming. LC has the best prep material for cracking an interview but not necessarily for competitive programming.
What is competetive programming?
It is where you compete with others to solve a programming problem within limited time frame. The first one to solve the problem, wins. Usually how u solve it won't matter in competitions. But LC gives thorough analysis of how good your solution was compared to others in terms of time and space complexity. This is really important to improve your technical interviewing skills. And this is one of the key things interviewers look for. Hope you already know most of it, as you work at Microsoft :)