Get another job that doesn't require 50-60 hour work weeks for crying out loud.
Ask HN: How do you make time for side projects and Leetcode grinding
41–50 of 98 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you make time for side projects and Leetcode grinding
#42You shouldn't need to spend a lot of time on leetcode as a senior engineer. I do one leetcode problem every week from lists of recommend problems. You will realistically have 40 min of time to work on the problem, and you will go slower during the interview, so if I don't get an optimal solution in 30 min I give up and look at a solution. I'll spend at most another 30 min filling the gaps in my knowledge that will le…
I'm a newer dev... just under a year and feel I've made decent progress in that time. I hear about leetcode a lot but honestly am not really sure what it is, why it's talked about so much, why people 'grind' leetcode... and why do you specifically do a leetcode problem each week? Is it specific to just a certain small set of languages? Are the specific types of questions asked by FAANG companies in interviews? What's…
They are the types of questions asked by FAANG and the wannabes (cargo cult style) for many years now. There's a site (and other resources) collecting those kinds of problems. They're mostly uninteresting and any CS graduate with a solid data structures and algorithms background (as in the 1xx and probably 3xx level courses, usually 2-3 total over a CS degree) should be able to figure them out if given time. But they aren't given time or they don't have that background or they putzed around in school instead of studying, so people memorize the answers instead for a large number of problems ("grinding") and hope that what they studied are the ones asked.
Re: Ask HN: How do you make time for side projects and Leetcode grinding
#43I must have had very different experiences from everyone as I can't imagine how grinding leetcode is a worthwhile activity. Do you want to do leetcode because you find it helpful or because the hive mind of the internet says you should?
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How do you make time for side projects and Leetcode grinding
#44Grinding leetcode is inefficient. What you should be doing is familiarizing yourself with the common patterns you might expect to see in an interview. Look at the blind 75 and https://seanprashad.com/leetcode-patterns/ . Initially, you don’t need to solve any of the problems from scratch. Look up the problem on YouTube and someone will walk you through it. This will build your intuition of when to reach for a heap or…
> After this, find a new job that is only 40 hours a week and voila you’ve just opened up 10-20 hours for personal projects.
That’s the key takeaway. If you want more time outside work, find a job that gives you more time.
I once worked a 40% job (16 hours a week). I travelled through eastern Canada and all over Europe for four months while working that job, without any stress keeping up with it. More or less broke even on expenses/income. It’s a period of my life I wouldn’t change for anything.
Re: Ask HN: How do you make time for side projects and Leetcode grinding
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. Do not try and do the problems from scratch. All you will end up doing is frustrating yourself for hours and taking far longer to get through the material than you need to. You wouldn't do this in any other field e.g you wouldn't jump into a Linear Algebra textbook with no prior experience and expect to be able to solve all of the problems without first reading the chapters. Don't expect to be able to do that w…
you just confirmed you don’t need any actual skill and just learn the solutions by heart to get hired
If learning how to solve problems by reading a book is "memorizing solutions by heart" then yes, that's how most people do things.
Look, as much as you might want to believe you (and everyone else in the industry) are geniuses, the fact is that we memorize a lot of stuff that were painstakingly invented or discovered by great minds in the past.
If that is "don't need any actual skill" according to your dictionary, then so be it.
Re: Ask HN: How do you make time for side projects and Leetcode grinding
#46My career was typically 60-80 hours a week, and I managed to do a Bachelors degree during it (military). My example is to say it’s POSSIBLE; I do not recommend it however. Here’s how I did it: First, a supportive spouse. They need to have 100% buy-in on what you are doing and why. Second, an solid goal. Why are you doing this? Without this, you won’t make it far. Third, a healthy mind and body to hold up to the strai…
So, I did this too, but would not recommend it in general. I was a commissioned officer, so possibly even more busy, and went back to school for Applied Mathematics at first and then ended up switching to Computer Science in order to reskill and get out of the military to go into software instead. I was up at 3 most mornings spending a few hours on studying and homework, took another hour at lunch, then whatever it took in the evenings, on top of the job, staying in shape, bailing sergeants out of prison at 2 in the morning on Sunday, finding housing for privates who got kicked out of their houses for spousal battery, all the things you do in the military.
It's no way to live, frankly. I ended up with very serious spinal degeneration problems for years, probably due to the amount of sitting and all the rough exercise with no rest. I got divorced.
I guess it's a fine thing to do once in your life when you're still in your 20s. I got a significant bump up, earn more than a four-star general now, and never even work 40 hours in a week, let alone nights and weekends and being 24/7 on call like in the military. But the entire purpose of doing this is to relax afterward. You can't live your entire life like this. Nobody should be grinding and hussling for decades. Every now and then, I still get incredible spurts of energy to dive deep into side projects, continuing education, professional development, and all that, but we're talking maybe a couple months here and there every other year or so, and it's driven by honest intellectual curiosity, not by the feeling I have to do it or risk losing relevance. When you get older and have a family, they're more important. Your kids are never going to give a shit if you earn 400k or 700k and they're never going to give a shit if you're out of work for only 2 weeks or your next job search takes 3 months. It's not that big of a deal. But neglecting them and missing out on their lives is.
Ideally, find an actual job where the challenges and problems you face in the job itself force you to learn and keep up on skills. Don't blow the only spare time you have keeping up skills because your paid work is boring and unchallenging.
Re: Ask HN: How do you make time for side projects and Leetcode grinding
#47You shouldn't need to spend a lot of time on leetcode as a senior engineer. I do one leetcode problem every week from lists of recommend problems. You will realistically have 40 min of time to work on the problem, and you will go slower during the interview, so if I don't get an optimal solution in 30 min I give up and look at a solution. I'll spend at most another 30 min filling the gaps in my knowledge that will le…
I'm a newer dev... just under a year and feel I've made decent progress in that time. I hear about leetcode a lot but honestly am not really sure what it is, why it's talked about so much, why people 'grind' leetcode... and why do you specifically do a leetcode problem each week? Is it specific to just a certain small set of languages? Are the specific types of questions asked by FAANG companies in interviews? What's…
Leetcode is essentially what a Comp Sci student learns in their 2nd year Algorithms course. There are a few more esoteric algorithms that don't get covered in college and but 90% is stuff I remember from college.
Re: Ask HN: How do you make time for side projects and Leetcode grinding
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. Do not try and do the problems from scratch. All you will end up doing is frustrating yourself for hours and taking far longer to get through the material than you need to. You wouldn't do this in any other field e.g you wouldn't jump into a Linear Algebra textbook with no prior experience and expect to be able to solve all of the problems without first reading the chapters. Don't expect to be able to do that w…
you just confirmed you don’t need any actual skill and just learn the solutions by heart to get hired
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How do you make time for side projects and Leetcode grinding
#49I must have had very different experiences from everyone as I can't imagine how grinding leetcode is a worthwhile activity. Do you want to do leetcode because you find it helpful or because the hive mind of the internet says you should?
You have to do leetcode if you want any hope of being able to find a different job. You have to be ready for that kind of question.
I’m a software engineer with 20+ years of experience in a bunch of different industries. I know what I’m doing.
I did 3 interviews with 3 different companies in the past couple months and utterly failed at the leetcode style coding interviews. The last one was to “print out the contents of a binary tree, each level on its own line.”
I had 1/2 hour to do it. Oh, and I had to translate their sample seed code from Python to Java, since I’m stronger in Java.
I haven’t seen a raw binary tree in 20+ years. I at least remembered how to depth first traverse it, but haven’t seen in order traversal since my freshman year of college.
So look-I was able to read and translate Python, a language I don’t use to one I do, and pull out of deep storage how to traverse a binary tree one way, but since I couldn’t remember the other ways, I failed.
My daily job is far more about translating complex business requirements into appropriate data stores, improving performance, working with cloud providers - NOT banging out freshman level programming tasks. I’m out of practice for that.
So to be in a position to change jobs, you sadly have to spend time keeping that information freshened.
It’s not helpful to leetcode grind; I’d rather spend the time and energy I have for non-work coding to learn a net-new language. It’s not the “hive mind saying we should”.
It’s the stark reality of the hiring processes everyone has decided is necessary because there’s a myth that no one applying for a software development job can code and if you don’t do these kinds of interviews (and don’t screen any other way) you’ll hire these fakes.
Re: Ask HN: How do you make time for side projects and Leetcode grinding
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. Do not try and do the problems from scratch. All you will end up doing is frustrating yourself for hours and taking far longer to get through the material than you need to. You wouldn't do this in any other field e.g you wouldn't jump into a Linear Algebra textbook with no prior experience and expect to be able to solve all of the problems without first reading the chapters. Don't expect to be able to do that w…
you just confirmed you don’t need any actual skill and just learn the solutions by heart to get hired
That's a disingenuous take. It's extremely unlikely you'll get asked any of these specific questions, but very likely you'll be asked something in the general space.
Core knowledge extrapolates... to learn system design, one studies the design of "solved" systems, thus learning to solve for new design problems.
If a company is asking leetcode questions verbatim, they probably don't care so much about that part of the interview anyway