Live data from Hacker News

A guide to learning algorithms through LeetCode

github.com

21–30 of 222 posts

Re: A guide to learning algorithms through LeetCode

#21
It's becoming obvious to me that my time is better spent learning to solve these riddles rather than actually becoming a better developer. I have a job search coming up at the end of the year and whilst I've managed to largely avoid companies that ask this type of question, I believe it's seriously constraining my career.

I can't speak for everyone but the whiteboard interview has prevented me from leaving jobs earlier, moving jobs more frequently and left me avoiding certain companies altogether.

Re: A guide to learning algorithms through LeetCode

#22

It's becoming obvious to me that my time is better spent learning to solve these riddles rather than actually becoming a better developer. I have a job search coming up at the end of the year and whilst I've managed to largely avoid companies that ask this type of question, I believe it's seriously constraining my career. I can't speak for everyone but the whiteboard interview has prevented me from leaving jobs earli…

I wonder if that isn’t the point, to increase developer retention and reduce competition for devs.

Re: A guide to learning algorithms through LeetCode

#23
post #22

It's becoming obvious to me that my time is better spent learning to solve these riddles rather than actually becoming a better developer. I have a job search coming up at the end of the year and whilst I've managed to largely avoid companies that ask this type of question, I believe it's seriously constraining my career. I can't speak for everyone but the whiteboard interview has prevented me from leaving jobs earli…

I wonder if that isn’t the point, to increase developer retention and reduce competition for devs.

It would be a "tragedy of the commons"-like effect for companies that don't adhere. I would guess that is just an unintended effect and that there is no master plan behind making recruiting expensive, slow and inaccurate.

Re: A guide to learning algorithms through LeetCode

#24
post #22

It's becoming obvious to me that my time is better spent learning to solve these riddles rather than actually becoming a better developer. I have a job search coming up at the end of the year and whilst I've managed to largely avoid companies that ask this type of question, I believe it's seriously constraining my career. I can't speak for everyone but the whiteboard interview has prevented me from leaving jobs earli…

I wonder if that isn’t the point, to increase developer retention and reduce competition for devs.

Surely the generous pay is the biggest factor for retention?

Competition is ill defined in the labor market because people aren’t fungible. So it’s hard to really point to hard evidence, so and so practice leads to so and so change in salaries or increase in retention.

Aside, nobody said this guy was looking for a low paying job. High paying ones want leetcode.

Google will pay a higher salary to a 21 year old than a Miami firm will pay to someone with 10 years of experience. Nobody will ask you these puzzles outside of ~5 markets in the US. They also pay way less.

Re: A guide to learning algorithms through LeetCode

#26
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if that isn’t the point, to increase developer retention and reduce competition for devs.

Surely the generous pay is the biggest factor for retention? Competition is ill defined in the labor market because people aren’t fungible. So it’s hard to really point to hard evidence, so and so practice leads to so and so change in salaries or increase in retention. Aside, nobody said this guy was looking for a low paying job. High paying ones want leetcode. Google will pay a higher salary to a 21 year old than a…

Anecdotally I would say job satisfaction is at least as important a factor in retention, at least until employees are old enough to have started a family.

Many young people (age 20-30) I know are in a situation where they are paid large sums of money ($100k-$200k) for extremely dull work. I've seen most of my friends from college quit their FAANG job in search of something more fulfilling, often at a 50% or more pay cut.

Re: A guide to learning algorithms through LeetCode

#27
post #16

Found in my bookmarks: https://leetfree.com/ Not sure if all quizzes are original, but some of them looks interesting.

Can anyone explain/interpret what leetfree.com is saying here? > ... don't try to solve it with online judge ... > ... Try to learn from the solutions we provided as quickly as possible ... > ... Interviewers only care about your WhiteBoard communication skills ... Are they implying that rote memorization (memorize all problems and their solutions) is the best/easiest way to do the interviews? If yes, wouldn't that t…

Online judge is competitive programming like https://open.kattis.com/ or CodeWars or CodeForces meaning a server that takes your source, compiles and runs it, tests if you satisfied all the req of the challenge. There's books for this https://cpbook.net/#CP4content and despite leetfree claims of being 'useless because no online judge in interview' there is actually 2-3 judges sitting there in the interview performing the same function, telling you if your code does not satisfy the problem requirements

Re: A guide to learning algorithms through LeetCode

#28

Found in my bookmarks: https://leetfree.com/ Not sure if all quizzes are original, but some of them looks interesting.

Firefox says, "Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead" for that website.

Nice how browsers have trained people to be scared if there's not a lock. It's just an expired cert, not revoked, and you're not entering payment information.

Re: A guide to learning algorithms through LeetCode

#29
post #22

It's becoming obvious to me that my time is better spent learning to solve these riddles rather than actually becoming a better developer. I have a job search coming up at the end of the year and whilst I've managed to largely avoid companies that ask this type of question, I believe it's seriously constraining my career. I can't speak for everyone but the whiteboard interview has prevented me from leaving jobs earli…

I wonder if that isn’t the point, to increase developer retention and reduce competition for devs.

That could be part of it, but I don't think it's the primary reason. Rather I believe it's just one example of a more general, emergent phenomenon in capitalism, in which the top decile of jobs in high paying careers converge to interview methods which are a legal proxy for IQ testing.

It is a game of cat and mouse between candidates and companies. The candidates want high pay and interesting work, and the companies want only the top n% of candidates for their work, for some metric of their choosing. However many candidates a company has to choose from, they will devise some way of choosing the best among them. The methods for determining the best become (in my opinion) increasingly pathological as the surplus of candidates increases. In tech, the result is that the past decade has seen a supermajority of the most lucrative, mainstream jobs moving to a local maximum: whiteboard interviews based on data structures and algorithms. In response, candidates have gamified the process of studying for these metrics using Leetcode, and so a cottage industry of adult test prep was born.

Other industries use extreme credentialism or other methods to cut down on the vast majority of resumes they see, and there likewise emerges a cottage industry of professional preparation to break into these careers at the highest level. The companies use these methods because they see an absolute glut of candidates and become risk averse to bad hires - because after all, if they can attract so much talent with high pay and prestige, why should they suffer possible duds? This is how we end up with the, "Google is okay with passing on false negatives but can't tolerate a false positive in their hiring process" reasoning.

Post reply on HN