Little bit about me. Was a bright student until high school. Did nothing in college, only studied enough to pass my exams. Came to US for masters in a decent university, struggled my ass off to pass basic CS courses but somehow got out with 3.6 GPA. Worked at a small company for 2 years and moved to Amazon as SDE 1. Got promoted and SDE 2 now. How do I get better at leetcoding? Right now I can solve easy problems but that’s it. I can’t solve most medium problems let alone hard ones. I am decent at cs fundamentals. In most cases when I try to solve medium questions, I can brute force. But when some one asks me for an optimized solution, I have no idea. I’m blank and nothing comes to my mind. This feels so demotivating when everyone around me is getting a 400k+ job. I have got rejects at Microsoft, Doordash, Dropbox, ByteDance. I have Uber next and am probably going to fail that too. Problem is I don’t even find leetcode interesting anymore. Because when I pick up a problem I usually try to solve it for an hour, can’t do it and look at the solution. This happens almost everytime. Is there an order in which I should solve these problems or what? I wanna get better. But how? For those people who have been in my shoes (or haven’t been), can you please help me? If someone is willing to provide a referral, that’d be great too. I hate working at Amazon. TC:250 YOE: 6 #leetcode #softwareengineer #tech
Keep looking at the solutions. Try to understand them, Looks at them on youtube to understand more if visual helps. Do this for 50-100 problems and you start seeing a pattern and you would be able to start solving them on your own
Wow cry me a river dude. You make 250k TC at a FAANG. There are millions of people who’d die to be in your position. Yet you cry because you don’t make 400k?
I’m one of the million. :)
Yes and not just that. It’s also because i feel like I am not able to improve my coding abilities and that’s being directly reflected in my interview rejects.
lol no body solves medium/hard optimally without practice.
Try to understand the concept of each algorithm and data structure. Code them from scratch. LC count doesnt mean much if you don't know them well
If you are not having fun or mildly interested you will not get there period. It happened to me. Do you have any buddies you can challenge yourself with? Get some drinks together and try to outpace each other on questions. I find that a little competition always makes things more fun.
If OP doesn't enjoy solving problems, passing interviews will be difficult sooner or later
So how did you develop interest or did you ever develop interest?
Good luck with your Uber interview. I got obliterated by Uber today. Got google coming up next.
You just have to practice unfortunately. It's not a fun grind but it's required.
I have been feeling like that a lot lately and I had to cancel my interviews due to personal stuff. However I am trying to get back on track due to obvious lack of motivation for both work and interview and one thing that helped me was doing everything using the pomodoro technique. Spend 30 mins doing leetcode and if you don't get it, look up the solution and take 5 mins break. It helps with distraction for me and I have been getting a little hang of things.
Well you can do brute force, so now you have a foundation. All you need to do is be more intentional when reading solutions. Figure out what's the next piece you need to observe in order to get a better solution. Then eventually after doing a lot of these you recognize way more patterns and can do it just like you do brute force now. Also it helps to stop LC for a while and actually read some CS algo tutorials so you have more context