Why so negative about leetcode

People who suck at leetcode are usually the ones who are negative about it. Hence they dismiss it as sour grapes.

Leetcode isn’t the issue here. Here’s what happening: 1) lots of people are doing leetcode and hence the bar for making errors has gone dramatically high. 2) you could be an exceptional problem solver but you didn’t see a problem (or pattern before) and you get stuck while someone else has solved 500 problems and aces that interview. All of a sudden they get the job. 3) most interviewers are inexperienced and many feels they can only judge by asking hard leetcode questions and look for binary signals in evaluating (yes or no, rather than depth). Leetcode is great and made be get back to problem solving and it’s fun, however it has made the field immensely more competitive.

If a person is able to solve a problem because of doing similar problems in leetcode. It only tells that the person has spent time preparing and is hard working. That is also a good quality to be prepared, and interviewers like that. That being said, we often encounter people who have not done much preparation, but their fundamentals are strong and they are able to figure out different solutions to a problem. So it doesn’t really matter in the end as the interviewer is looking for both hard working and creative people. Sometimes you also encounter who is both.

This is no different than cracking those competitive Engineering school entrance exams in India or China. All your experience, talent is worthless to these drones. All they want is a Black/White answer to a qn that has methodical solution someone could have simply practiced

Leetcode sucked the fun out of problem solving. 1. It lets interviewers be lazy and make binary decisions. Which means, they don't care who their coworker is going to be. They could be a psychopathic customer info seller for all you know 2. It is a singular measure. Over optimizing for one single thing. Algorithmic solutions to textbook problems. There is more to CS than that 3. It encourages candidates (thus, future software engineers) to not be wholesome software engineers but to be mechanical rote memorizers. This shows in the quality of their code. Look up some popular "open sourced" code at popular leetcoding companies 4. It devalues experience. Really, if everything was as simple as leetcode, anyone could've come up with map reduce. Why did it take 2 phds with years of experience with systems and lisp, I don't know 5. I hate working with Co workers who can solve all algorithmic problems but cannot produce solid productive output. Leetcoders reinvent the wheel, spend time fretting about stupid algos and time complexities way too often. There is a place for this sure but not all of software engineering is just that 6. Lastly, and my biggest gripe, is that it creates a class of interviewers who have absolutely no fucking clue that leetcode is not the best/singular/good way toeasure your future co-worker. These memorizing nerds are good at solving puzzles in one language but suck in others and don't understand the perspective of others...leading to questions like yours OP. I have met Java programmers (at Google) rejecting c programmers cuz the interviewer did not know that c doesn't have an API to get array length. In c, you need to find the size and pass it around. I have almost started questioning the quality of many leetcoders as software engineers. P.S. I forgot to add: - it creates a non reproducible process. The same candidate can get through with one set of questions and fail with another. For a profession that derives it's reputation on precision, the hiring process sucks pretty bad - it hires people who slack off at current work to practice leetcode over actually productive people. Who do we want as a coworker?

It's mostly old heads complaining about leetcode

Honestly negative answers here still did not give me answer. And they remind me old corporate guys. I had a colleague who would name all design patterns, loots of technical terms in a single sentence. After 1 year ZERO line of his code was shipped to production.

Also those negative comments are from second-class company (amazon, cisco) folks. I am not afraid of saying that because i have passed interviews to both of them, got offers. But people i have met there + the offer I knew I am too good for them

Leetcode is a lifestyle.

Leetcode is more fun than 90% of the jobs which is just plumbing.