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Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

leetcodetherapy.com

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Re: Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

#61

Post by lentil_soup »

jitl wrote: post #50
lentil_soup wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the guide to engineering interviews you posted, but I am curious about the difference between your "Technical Screen" and leetcode type questions. Having to solve a problem while someone is watching and having to talk while you do it sounds similar to the FAANG style. Maybe I'm missing something?

From our guide: > Please prepare a skeleton web application, using any web server framework you like, preferably a lightweight one, e.g. express (node), flask (python), sinatra (ruby). > Have a tool to send payloads to your server and inspect responses, for example cURL or Postman. No front-end client is required other than cURL or Postman to send test requests. This will be a backend only exercise. This is a far cry…

Hmm I don't see the quoted text in the guide. Maybe it's something different internally?

The page I see only says there's a 60min "language-agnostic coding exercise" and that you have to share your screen and talk through your thought process. That's why it felt similar to leetcode stuff.

Re: Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

#62

Post by mewpmewp2 »

thom wrote: post #40
jitl wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" ( htt…

I say this as a happy Notion customer who spends a lot of time evangelising it within my own company: Notion is one of the most unpleasantly slow apps I have to use in my daily work, it has been the same way for years, and I can't help but think that a deeper appreciation of computer science fundamentals _might_ possibly help find better ways to fix that.

Haven't tried Notion yet, but is Notion really slower than Jira/Atlassian products?

Re: Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

#63

Post by thom »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #62
thom wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say this as a happy Notion customer who spends a lot of time evangelising it within my own company: Notion is one of the most unpleasantly slow apps I have to use in my daily work, it has been the same way for years, and I can't help but think that a deeper appreciation of computer science fundamentals _might_ possibly help find better ways to fix that.

Haven't tried Notion yet, but is Notion really slower than Jira/Atlassian products?

Probably not that bad these days, although it depends on your content and workflow. I _enjoy_ Notion more, and for what it's worth I do actually trust Notion to give more a shit about it than Atlassian, but it's still the most common complaint I get from teams. Trello is certainly vastly snappier than both (as is a Google Spreadsheet, which is many users' go-to solution for any type of even vaguely structured data).

Re: Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

#64

Post by CoolGuySteve »

tester34 wrote: post #44
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…

>Funny thing is, even though the top dogs in China got the best talented engineers in the entire nation, their public-facing products are still nothing but trash (or even fruaddy). And as for those engineers, many of them has their own big dreams, but they cannot realize it because the market is a highly restricted blood sea. How so? when it comes to scale they easily compete with FAANG, don't they? Tencent, Alibaba,…

Someone just released a product that offloads Chrome to the cloud. Gmail has a very long loading screen. Hangouts was replaced by something like 4 incompatible apps. Android phones are significantly less power efficient than iPhones. YouTube copyright notices are trivial to game.

Google’s software over the past 10 years or so leaves a lot to be desired and they’re the worst offender for filtering by leetcode-style interviews.

Re: Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

#65

Post by honkdaddy »

osti wrote: post #55
sirpunch wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know about the 1point3acrea forum for LeetCode-based interview preparation. I was told by a friend to check it out as they have an extensive set of tips, tricks and general suggestions. Their forums and posts seem to be mostly in Mandarin and Google translate doesn't take you far. So I was hoping to get some Chinese tech person's opinion on 1p3a.

If you don't possess advanced understanding of Chinese, then don't even think about trying to read it. I came to Canada in my teens and I often have trouble understanding. The forum rules dictate that you write cryptically. But it is incredibly useful if you understand it imo, especially the interview experiences. That's why they can charge like 80usd per month for VIP access..

Can you shed a bit more light on what kind of thing is discussed?

Is it similar to Blind in that it's a lot of people talking about how to pragmatically game the interview process?

Re: Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

#66

Post by collyw »

Alternatively just refuse to do leetcode "challenges". As a software engineer leetcode is barely related to what i actually do in my job. Anyone who thinks it is a good way of evaluating candidates is a clown.

Re: Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

#67

Post by nomy99 »

I started doing leetcode when the pandemic hit. I wanted to be ready in case I got fired and I have to do an interview... surprisingly I fell in love with it. I am one of those ppl that writes codes in their head, so I just look at a problem and go on with my day until I have a solution. Then I write it and test it out.

It's enjoyable to me, and I have been forced to learn a lot of CS concepts I had forgotten and techniques I wasn't aware of.

I don't approach it with the drudge of performance, but just as something I do now. Like other things in my life, basketball practice, namely.

I am pretty sure eventually I'll be in a position I can breeze through an interview if I really wanted to, but that's not my goal anymore out of leetcode.

Re: Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

#68

Post by Jaygles »

legerdemain wrote: post #31

You really need to decide in advance what you want to get out of LeetCode. It has a lot to give. For example, some LeetCode questions are textbook problems. You really should familiarize yourself with them, but you will probably never see them verbatim on an interview. Other LeetCode questions are too tedious or time-consuming to do on a whiteboard in an hour. You will also not see them on an interview. For some peop…

I think a lot of people lump leetcode questions into one thing, when it can be as many things as one would like it to be. I like to do the easy questions to familiarize myself with a new language.

There are certain questions that are math questions disguised as programming questions. I like to do those when I feel like brushing up my math knowledge.

There are questions that test your knowledge on data structures. I like to do those if I want to learn that.

There are questions that test your knowledge on algorithms.

And there are questions that combine some or all of the above.

How one uses leetcode or leetcode style questions is up to them. I think exploring the extremes of possible answers for the questions is a completely fine way to spend your time. And I also think there are several questions on leetcode that should be no where near an interview. But people aren't perfect and you often see those questions misapplied in an attempt to gauge skill.

Re: Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

#69

Post by honkdaddy »

01100011 wrote: post #41
pmiller2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just gonna glom on to this for visibility, but I'd like to say I wish there was a good list of companies that don't do leetcode-style interviews. Frankly, I'm sick of leetcode, and I feel like it takes a lot of fun out of working in tech to have to grind this skill that's completely unrelated to any sort of real work. (Rant mode off) Anybody know of such a list? Edit: I should add that I'd really like to be point…

Do you want companies that don't do leetcode, or companies that don't do leetcode yet pay you a FANG salary? The list of companies that don't do leetcode are probably quite long, but you're looking at an average salary in an average town(i.e. $120-180k/year salary with decent benefits and meager stock opportunities). There's nothing wrong with that. I'd certainly go that route if I could afford to. If you're looking…

Not sure how well updated it is anymore, but I remember this juicy list floating around HN a couple years ago.

https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

Re: Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

#70

Post by uglygoblin »

Toutouxc wrote: post #34
whycombagator wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I still don't see the memorization part. The last time I touched quicksort was at uni, three years ago, I still understand how it works (choose a pivot, partition the rest according to the elements' relation to the pivot, then quicksort the partitions), and I'm pretty sure I'd be able to implement it right now. Maybe not in C, but in Ruby, absolutely. Understanding is the hard part, the implementation should be the a…

"I still understand how it works" is memory. Maybe you have an amazing memory but imagine 15 years later.
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