I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

Undoubtedly I’ve closed doors and passed up opportunities through my refusal to contort myself to the LeetCode regime. At the same time, the time that I would’ve spent drilling myself on superficial coding puzzles I’ve instead invested in building practical applications for my friend’s business, learning and applying machine learning theory to automate a boring task during an internship, implementing a processor in Verilog and writing an assembler for its ISA that I managed to get running on an FPGA, working on an open source digital contact tracing app, and several other projects.

The projects I’ve spent time on are those that I deem to genuinely valuable to society and to my personal skill development in the broadest, most fully integrated conception of ‘valuable’ that I can achieve. To clarify, I could see an counter point being made that LeetCode skills are “valuable” in the sense that I could use them to get a higher paying job at $TECH_CO. But from a higher level perspective, those skills are tailored towards a system (the LeetCode hiring gauntlet) that I think is fundamentally corrupt, and so to spend my energy practicing them for the sake of that system would be corrupting of my integrity.

And despite the admonitions I’ve received from supposedly more pragmatic-minded people, I’ve been able to pull together a living and have a budding career to speak of. My job hunts have perhaps been more drawn out and frustrated than the LeetCode crew, but I believe my focus on genuine knowledge and skill development has contributed to my high performance at the jobs I have managed to land. And by being straightforward about my disinterest in hoop jumping and interest in “real skills”, I’ve managed to befriend and work with companies and people that share similar values to me, who in my view are more rewarding to work with and tend to be more likely to succeed in the long run.

I'm stopping short of making any generalizations, because in my experience the evidence (for me at least) isn't there to make any. Perhaps things are different elsewhere, though. I'm only speaking from my experience, as I suppose we all are.

Most societies indoctrinate people to "respect their elders" to varying degrees.

A younger person having authority over an older person is a role reversal many are not equipped to deal with, from either side of that equation.

So it is noticed more.

Further, this elephant in the room has to be acknowledged before either side can move on meaningfully. But you can't "discriminate based on age" or you might end up in court depending on where in the world you are.

Makes it a tricky problem that I am not surprised people just "avoid".

You're just bombarded with the stuff that you should know - well, according to internet forums, at least.

On top of your basic CS curriculum, you should also be "crushing it" in:

- Full-stack development - Research-level Machine Learning - Heavy side projects like creating your own crypto currency, algorithmic trading platform, or whatever.

All while burning through the tens to hundreds of leetcode problems.

And of course, if you're a frequent visitor of certain forums or blogging platforms, you will find some user that's doing all of the above. Flashy website, writing research papers on the latest ML/Deep Learning models, writing interactive and insightful tutorials on leetcode problems, all while keeping a 4.0 throughout their CS-studies and climbing up the career-ladder and getting better internships every year.

I think that if you're comparing yourself to those types, and trying to keep up with them, you're gonna end up spending a lot of time without getting much done.

Of course, all while visiting the usual suspects of time-thieves (FB, Twitter, HN, Reddit, etc.)

There's this myth being perpetuated on most CS career forums (where 99% of the posters are other CS students) that you need to be some super-human rock star to even be worthy of the most lowly position. It's that, or bust.