Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only that, I had to pay for my own lunch and it took four weeks for it to finally say it wasn't hiring me. Is the problem with leetcode the content or the process? The process is utterly broken, but any time hiring comes up it feels like most complaints are about the content.
IMO there's an often unspoken divide here. There's the group of people for whom doing these "Algos I" problems in university was relatively painless; not that all problems were "easy" but there's an ease to approaching the problem, and with enough continuous effort the problem is solved. These people also tend to have good retention such that 10 years later, they just need to practice LC for a few weeks and they're b…
This is indeed a good thing to be able to do. I'm pretty good at it, but when I'm in an interview situation, I almost always have at least one moment where I start to panic a little and have to tell myself, "you know what you're doing, just relax and turn the crank." And of course, there's an implied "...but maybe you'll just choke," which I have to put out of my mind.
In other words, a huge part of being able to focus on the problem and remove the surrounding context is a sort of confidence that I can probably do fine, so I can temporarily stop worrying about how I'm looking at any exact moment.