Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

leetcodetherapy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 157 posts

Re: Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

#21

Post by nirui »

Mandatum wrote: post #19
nirui wrote: post #13

> We don't realize something important - Leetcode is a competitive programming platform at its core, not an interview platform. Yet, we fall into the trap of thinking it's an educational website. There is a word circling China's Internet call "内卷", which can be translated directly to Involution, but on the ground it actually means "Over competition" or "Doing zero-sum competition". People trying to climb over the oth…

Can anyone recommend reading materials on this? Not sure where to start but this sounds really interesting.

Here's somebody's write up in Chinese, which actually is the second Google search results for keyword "内卷": https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/250474212

If you want to read official tune, here's the article about "内卷" among university students: http://www.xinhuanet.com/2020-11/09/c_1126713666.htm

Other than those publicly searchable contact. There are many nonpublic/deepnet information, for example, recruitment ads, under table HR rules etc.

Here is a recruitment ads from Minhang District government that set age limit (from 18 to 35 years old) for no good reason: http://xxgk.shmh.gov.cn/mhxxgkweb/html/mh_xxgk/ggxxgk_xxgg/2.... And another one from Zhongwei City: http://www.nxzw.gov.cn/xwzx/tzgg/202103/P0202103163192272939...

Case and point, this problem is widespread and kind common knowledge in China.

Re: Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

#22

Post by redis_mlc »

imwillofficial wrote: post #5

What’s a good way to pickup CS skills in a well rounded manner outside of a CS degree? Moving from Sysadmin to DevOps rolls and need to learn this stuff.

> need to learn this stuff.

If you are a traditional sysadmin with limited programming experience, then you have a very tough road ahead of you in 2021 - getting up to speed now is not picking up "stuff", think of it as a new career.

You should stay at your current job and work on devops projects to learn the devops tools and skills and get proficient at basic programming first.

After that, start on more advanced programming.

If that doesn't get you through interviews, then LeetCode. I put this last because even with a fair amount of practise, most people can't finish a difficult problem in 30 or 60 minutes and pass the test suite.

I don't get why interviewers sometimes start with, "Sorry, this is the problem, but nobody ever finishes it." (One was write a hash library with tests in 30 minutes, for a devops role.) You just have to move on to the next company.

Re: Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

#24

Post by jitl »

Don’t want to do Leetcode? Me neither — after I left Airbnb I vowed to not work at any company that asks this kind of question. I interviewed at a bunch of interesting companies (Airtable, Brex, Eaze, Figma, Lob, Notion, ...) none of which asked this kind of algo brain teaser question. There are tons of places out there with great product, interesting problems, and good compensation - so if you hate this bullshit, don’t give up.

I interview candidates every day, and my impression is that a candidate from FAANG/leetcode company is no better or worse than any other candidate.

Anywho, I’m hiring for a bunch of roles - full stack, Android, infra, SRE, early career, etc - if you’re interested in Notion (https://www.notion.so/careers) ping me on Twitter @jitl.

Re: Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

#25

Post by novok »

whycombagator wrote: post #16

> Here's all you need - master 100 problems first, then slowly progress to maybe 200 more problems. Do it well, and you can crack several top companies. Memoizing 300 questions isn’t easy

The point isn't memorizing, it's understanding. If you don't understand, memorizing will only get you so far.

Re: Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

#26

Post by hivacruz »

That's funny, I got anxiety not because I mainly could not solve algorithms problems (looking at you, graphs) but also because I could not beat my colleagues or friends who started to play too.

I used to play heavily on CodeSignal, a similar website. They used to post daily challenges back then. But there, it wasn't about reaching the best time complexity or whatever: the number of characters was more important, like on Code Golf.

You first try to solve the problem and then you try to reduce your code to the minimum. The level of anxiety was starting to be really hard to handle and I'm happy I stopped playing this. Also, writing creative small codes won't help you when developing real softwares that much since most of the times, small codes or one liners are terrible in terms of time complexity or memory.

I learned a few tricks and a lot of things about how some languages work through this practice and by looking at people solutions but I'm pretty sure it would have been better to read some algorithms courses instead.

Re: Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

#27

Post by qPM9l3XJrF »

jitl wrote: post #24

Don’t want to do Leetcode? Me neither — after I left Airbnb I vowed to not work at any company that asks this kind of question. I interviewed at a bunch of interesting companies (Airtable, Brex, Eaze, Figma, Lob, Notion, ...) none of which asked this kind of algo brain teaser question. There are tons of places out there with great product, interesting problems, and good compensation - so if you hate this bullshit, do…

What do you do instead?

It seems to me that having tough interview questions can allow a company to be less credentialist, because they know their questions are tough enough that anyone who solves them is qualified to work there. My resume doesn't necessarily make me look like a senior developer, but leetcode mediums are no trouble for me and with a little effort I think I could learn to solve hards quickly and reliably as well. So I've got a comparative advantage applying at a company that has that sort of interview.

Re: Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

#28

Post by whycombagator »

novok wrote: post #25
whycombagator wrote: post #16

> Here's all you need - master 100 problems first, then slowly progress to maybe 200 more problems. Do it well, and you can crack several top companies. Memoizing 300 questions isn’t easy

The point isn't memorizing, it's understanding. If you don't understand, memorizing will only get you so far.

Sure but one can understand quicksort, then forget how to implement it a month later. Or not be able to modify it to produce quick select.

So really, you do need to memorize stuff. Maybe not questions per se, but certainly patterns and techniques (on top of understanding the fundamentals)

Re: Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

#29

Post by onion2k »

cebert wrote: post #10

I wonder ten years from now how common LeetCode like interviews are. These types of interviews favor those who have the luxury of ample time to prep for difficult interviews and aren’t representative of most daily working environments. This process fails to consider candidates that would be good fits. When I help with interviews, I place much more values on communication skills, teamwork, mentorship, and a general pa…

These types of interviews favor those who have the luxury of ample time to prep for difficult interviews...

Interviews that test for anything that isn't directly related to the job the candidate will be doing are essentially codified discrimination - the expectation that someone will have a skill or significant knowledge outside of the job itself is effectively a way to filter out candidates based on arbitrary criteria even if they are capable of doing the work.

In other words, Leetcode interviews favoring people with lots of spare time is by design, because that's who companies that use Leetcode want to hire. There is little reason to believe that will change.

Re: Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

#30

Post by jitl »

qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #27
jitl wrote: post #24

Don’t want to do Leetcode? Me neither — after I left Airbnb I vowed to not work at any company that asks this kind of question. I interviewed at a bunch of interesting companies (Airtable, Brex, Eaze, Figma, Lob, Notion, ...) none of which asked this kind of algo brain teaser question. There are tons of places out there with great product, interesting problems, and good compensation - so if you hate this bullshit, do…

What do you do instead? It seems to me that having tough interview questions can allow a company to be less credentialist, because they know their questions are tough enough that anyone who solves them is qualified to work there. My resume doesn't necessarily make me look like a senior developer, but leetcode mediums are no trouble for me and with a little effort I think I could learn to solve hards quickly and relia…

We ask questions similar to the work you'd actually do at Notion; see our interview guide here: https://www.notion.so/Guide-to-Engineering-Interviews-63876c....

Looking at a smattering of leetcode mediums, I don't understand how someone being able to return "the elements of a 2d matrix in spiral order" (https://leetcode.com/problems/spiral-matrix/) or use Kadane's algortith to solve "k-concatenation max sum" (https://leetcode.com/problems/k-concatenation-maximum-sum/) pertains to building multiplayer software as part of a team.

Post reply on HN