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Ask HN: How do you make time for side projects and Leetcode grinding

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Re: Ask HN: How do you make time for side projects and Leetcode grinding

#81

Post by ljm »

satvikpendem wrote: post #69
b20000 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

engineering is about creativity and practice and not about memorizing standard solutions. leetcode does not test the skills that matter.

Leetcode is not for engineering on the job though, it's purely a test for getting hired. You wouldn't expect lawyers to take an LSAT while on the job. A lot of people, especially those who don't do Leetcode or work in a company that asks such questions, think Leetcode should somehow relate to the work and are annoyed, but it's just a test like any other.

To reword it, leetcode is a barrier to entry for newcomers. It's pure gatekeeping and it says as much when people think they have to 'grind' it to have any prospect of a job.

It teaches you absolutely nothing about the rest of the job, around comms and leadership, which most of the time are more important than your ability to solve puzzles.

It selects for people who want to get in and want to grind.

Re: Ask HN: How do you make time for side projects and Leetcode grinding

#82

Post by satvikpendem »

ljm wrote: post #81
satvikpendem wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leetcode is not for engineering on the job though, it's purely a test for getting hired. You wouldn't expect lawyers to take an LSAT while on the job. A lot of people, especially those who don't do Leetcode or work in a company that asks such questions, think Leetcode should somehow relate to the work and are annoyed, but it's just a test like any other.

To reword it, leetcode is a barrier to entry for newcomers. It's pure gatekeeping and it says as much when people think they have to 'grind' it to have any prospect of a job. It teaches you absolutely nothing about the rest of the job, around comms and leadership, which most of the time are more important than your ability to solve puzzles. It selects for people who want to get in and want to grind.

On the contrary, Leetcode is one of the most egalitarian ways there is for hiring applicants, because if you can pass the test, you're basically hired, at least at FAANG and adjacent. I'd hate to have employers show implicit bias through such saccharine distinctions as "personal fit."

Re: Ask HN: How do you make time for side projects and Leetcode grinding

#83

Post by dev_0 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #82
ljm wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To reword it, leetcode is a barrier to entry for newcomers. It's pure gatekeeping and it says as much when people think they have to 'grind' it to have any prospect of a job. It teaches you absolutely nothing about the rest of the job, around comms and leadership, which most of the time are more important than your ability to solve puzzles. It selects for people who want to get in and want to grind.

On the contrary, Leetcode is one of the most egalitarian ways there is for hiring applicants, because if you can pass the test, you're basically hired, at least at FAANG and adjacent. I'd hate to have employers show implicit bias through such saccharine distinctions as "personal fit."

Who will be hired if three candidates can pass the leetcode test?

Re: Ask HN: How do you make time for side projects and Leetcode grinding

#84

Post by dgunay »

b20000 wrote: post #62
pillefitz wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pattern recognition is pretty much at the core of creative work in an engineering context, of which memorizing existing patterns is the first half.

if you just need to apply standard patterns than you are not actually inventing but just doing code monkey stuff, and you can’t really call that engineering

I wouldn't call constantly inventing new technology the only thing that qualifies as "engineering". It's about solving the problem under the given constraints. Sometimes that means evaluating existing solutions and determining that the problem is not novel and can be solved either in whole or in part with off the shelf software or textbook algorithms.

The fact that this is the majority of business problems these days doesn't mean that no engineering is happening. IMO what actually is "not engineering" are the emotional, gut driven processes behind the software at some companies. No due diligence is done, requirements are scant, novelty frameworks are used, testing is a joke, etc. Anything resembling engineering is usually an accident in such places. I'm not saying process light environments are "not doing it right", I mean places that do nearly everything in an arbitrary, cargo-culted fashion.

Re: Ask HN: How do you make time for side projects and Leetcode grinding

#85

Post by [deleted] »

sanderjd wrote: post #71
jrjarrett wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think it has helped me to do five to ten hours of refresher on elementary data structures and algorithms in the week or so leading up to interviewing at places like Google and Stripe. But I really hate hearing that people are sinking hours and hours into doing tons of these problems, and on an ongoing basis. What a horrible waste of human life.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How do you make time for side projects and Leetcode grinding

#86

Post by Boxxed »

jrjarrett wrote: post #49
Boxxed wrote: post #15

I 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…

> I at least remembered how to depth first traverse it, but haven’t seen in order traversal since my freshman year of college.

Well, to be fair an in-order traversal is not what you needed to solve that problem...an in-order traversal would get you the elements of the tree sorted, irrespective of level. This is not a "gotcha" problem where you either know it or you don't, it's about using a basic data structure in kind if a weird way.

Re: Ask HN: How do you make time for side projects and Leetcode grinding

#87

Post by isbvhodnvemrwvn »

b20000 wrote: post #54
hnfong wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, th…

engineering is about creativity and practice and not about memorizing standard solutions. leetcode does not test the skills that matter.

Generously assuming software engineering is engineering - so you think that mechanical engineers or civil engineers don't reuse solutions 99.99% of the time?

Re: Ask HN: How do you make time for side projects and Leetcode grinding

#88

Post by isbvhodnvemrwvn »

Jtsummers wrote: post #68
jrjarrett wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 disagree with that statement. You don't have to do leetcode, though it can be helpful if they have leetcode-style problems to get timed practice (not everyone is good at the 30-minute challenge under pressure; for some reason my general test anxiety, which interviews can bring out, d…

You still need to practice, you won't be getting easy questions like that all the time. There are tricks you need to know to solve many others.

Re: Ask HN: How do you make time for side projects and Leetcode grinding

#89

Post by Stephen_0xFF »

b20000 wrote: post #38
rcarr wrote: post #35

Earlier 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

I’d agree with you if someone somehow managed to memorize all the problems line by line, but that isn’t the case.

You’ve memorized how to build an array in your language of choice. You’ve memorized the patterns that require an array. You might’ve also picked up some techniques for splicing it.

When I see a master working, be it in woodworking, art, or engineering, everything is second nature. Years of seeing what worked and what doesn’t and they make it look effortlessly — almost like they memorized it all.

By all means, if the problem can be easily solved by DFS, but you want to be creative, try something else. If it was really creative, the interviewers will be sure to talk you up and you’ll beat out the “code monkey” that used DFS. If you invented some new type of search, I’ll look out for your paper on it. If you found a new way to hire and cut candidates only leaving the creative geniuses, I’m all ears.

Re: Ask HN: How do you make time for side projects and Leetcode grinding

#90

Post by rcarr »

ljm wrote: post #81
satvikpendem wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leetcode is not for engineering on the job though, it's purely a test for getting hired. You wouldn't expect lawyers to take an LSAT while on the job. A lot of people, especially those who don't do Leetcode or work in a company that asks such questions, think Leetcode should somehow relate to the work and are annoyed, but it's just a test like any other.

To reword it, leetcode is a barrier to entry for newcomers. It's pure gatekeeping and it says as much when people think they have to 'grind' it to have any prospect of a job. It teaches you absolutely nothing about the rest of the job, around comms and leadership, which most of the time are more important than your ability to solve puzzles. It selects for people who want to get in and want to grind.

I think I disagree with this. I taught myself web dev mainly through Udemy courses and managed to land my first dev job through that. I've been working my way through Algomonster and Neetcode and, as someone with no formal education in computer science or programming, it's been filling in some gaps in my knowledge and I've mostly been enjoying the process. Some things I saw in the code base at my last job that I didn't comprehend fully at the time now make a lot more sense.
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