A guide to learning algorithms through LeetCode

It may be that the algorithms you’re required to come up with are still overkill in that they’re things you would not normally need to write from scratch on the spot without being able to references any resources in your day to day work. But as far as the format goes, this style of actually writing and executing code is clearly an improvement on the write-code-on-whiteboard style of interview.

I feel your pain though, the weeks of study that almost any good engineer needs to put into preparing for interviews can be pretty grueling.

Interview prep doesn't need to be a grind. One of the nice things about Leetcode is that the problems are bite-sized. You can do one or two per day on your lunch break and make a lot of progress in a matter of months, or even weeks.

Don't approach it like a cram session before your interviews. That doesn't work unless maybe you're a new college grad with no other obligations.

> go look at the leetcode discussion forums. There’s almost always some post at the top saying, “I did 1000 problems and won’t stop.

Obviously the Leetcode forums are going to be a hotbed of discussion about Leetcode. You have to keep in mind that many of those people are entry-level developers treating this as an extension of their education. For them, it's basically a miracle that a mostly-free website lets them practice for interviews for $200K-300K+ career paths from the comfort of their web browser. Compare that to just about any other high-paying industry, where getting the right education, credentials, certifications, and test results will take years of your life and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars of post-secondary education. We really have the easy end of this deal.

Don't let the total number of Leetcode questions overwhelm or discourage you. It shouldn't be approached as a cram session before the interview. It should be approached as a consistent habit or practice over a longer period of time.

If you just don't want to do any Leetcode or whiteboard interviews, that's fine too! There are plenty of jobs out there that won't require any of that.

However, you can't have it both ways: Big N salaries come with a high barrier to entry. All things considered, spending 50-100 hours of your free time solving problems on a free website at your leisure is really a small price to pay.

If you were capable of studying Leetcode so hard that you mastered the interview process at one of the most selective software companies in the world in only a few months, it's not much of a stretch to imagine that you could apply that same aptitude, ambition, and ability to learn quickly toward picking up the basics of git, dev ops, and so on.

Arguably, this is one of the benefits of Leetcode-style interviews. They focus on core software engineering aptitude, while not arbitrarily excluding people because they didn't use the right VCS at their last job.

Given that top dollar can mean potentially a six-figure raise over median salaries, that doesn't exactly seem like a bad deal.

All things considered, Leetcode is remarkably accessible relative to the barriers of entry in other high-paying fields like law, medicine, certain finance careers, and so on. It's a mostly-free website that you can work through at your leisure from the comfort of your home, with plenty of Google results to walk you through the questions if you run into a problem.

Have you spend some time on Leetcode already? I could see how the questions could be daunting to new grads, but I didn't find it all that painful with several years of industry programming experience.

Don't get discouraged by the sheer number of Leetcode problems. You don't have to do them all to get value out of it. The key is to do a couple per day in your free time (lunch break, while you eat breakfast, whatever). Any consistent practice will add up over weeks or months.

Your job is to be a clever code monkey. The Process will take care of turning your coding into engineering.

Leetcode interviews are great at testing for just that. A high IQ willing to solve arbitrary puzzles just because someone said “solve this”