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Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

leetcodetherapy.com

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Re: Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

#91

Post by TheAdamAndChe »

beforeolives wrote: post #52
01100011 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing wrong with that. SiValley is fucking toxic and I'd leave in a second if I could afford to(mid-life divorce... long story). Leave SiValley for the folks that need to be there(for ego, for money, to satisfy the lofty goals instilled by their society/family/etc). You'll lead a much more fulfilling life in a normal town with your friends and family around you.

> You'll lead a much more fulfilling life in a normal town with your friends and family around you. This is a false dichotomy. Leaving SV has nothing to do with your friends and family situation. So you can leave SV and be completely alone, or bored, or stuck in a toxic community. And you can also have family and friends in SV.

When I used to complain about the dearth of jobs in my region of the country(Midwest US), people would often say something along the lines of "well duh, the jobs are in SV and the coasts, you've gotta move." This means that I would have to move halfway across the country to one of the most expensive cities in the planet just to have an opportunity for a good job?

There's no way. My family is here. They don't work in tech, they couldn't afford the insane cost of living.

Re: Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

#92

Post by redis_mlc »

pmiller2 wrote: post #35
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…

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…

For Devops/SRE roles, these companies are asking actual LeetCode problems:

- Twitter

- Vindicia

- Google (has a reputation for dynamic programming problems)

But almost all companies are asking non-trivial questions in 2021 for Devops/SRE. Not LeetCode, but still high effort with intricate problem descriptions.

Re: Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

#93

Post by vladimirralev »

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…

Don't count on it going away ever. The programming languages/frameworks landscape is set to explode. It won't be possible to hire people based on experience with you specific languages and frameworks. The only equaliser is core knowledge - algos, data structures, OSes and design.

Re: Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

#94

Post by AlwaysRock »

ipnon wrote: post #2

After crashing and burning the startup rodeo, I gave up. I live off my savings, dabble in crypto for some income, and work on my own software to sell. I've never been happier. Silicon Valley didn't seem to want me anyway.

There is a middle ground. I work for a company that is pretty low stress. Salary is also a lot lower than FANG but I'm pretty steady at 40 hours a week and I don't have to live off of savings.

Re: Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

#95

Post by AlwaysRock »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #88
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…

It's not that different than lawyers needing to take the Bar exam (have to study on your own, and not all of it covered in school), or doctors having to pass boards. In both those fields practitioners spend a lot of time outside of "work" preparing. There will always be some sort of arbitrary selection screen as long as there are more people who want these high paying jobs than there are actual high paying jobs.

I really don't know but isnt the bar generally the same types of questions every year? Like the SAT? It feels like preping for interviews is hard in part because you could be asked anything from reverse a doubly linked list to design facebook. If it was a smaller set of questions it would be a lot easier to study for.

Re: Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

#96

Post by xibalba »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #64
tester34 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 in…

This could be explained by failures of management in addition to or as opposed to the ability of technical individual contributors.

Re: Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

#97

Post by walto2 »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #88
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…

It's not that different than lawyers needing to take the Bar exam (have to study on your own, and not all of it covered in school), or doctors having to pass boards. In both those fields practitioners spend a lot of time outside of "work" preparing. There will always be some sort of arbitrary selection screen as long as there are more people who want these high paying jobs than there are actual high paying jobs.

In software you do this every time you change jobs, and the randomness of the process ends up dictating which company you work at.

As an attorney, when you change jobs you've already passed the bar.

Re: Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety

#99

Post by hiq »

goatcode wrote: post #72

More and more tech companies are beginning to hire for soft skills as a main emphasis, with basic technical skills as a given. They're tending to intentionally NOT hire l337 folks, with a lot of emphasis on avoiding the "brilliant jerk." So, if you are personally interested in the work, willing to learn, and aren't a jerk, you'll probably go further than someone who has traveling salesman memorized in 8 languages.

> if you are personally interested in the work, willing to learn, and aren't a jerk, you'll probably go further than someone who has traveling salesman memorized in 8 languages.

I'm not sure how you test the first three qualities reliably in an interview. The point of leetcode interviews is that they are arguably harder to game: if you manage to write some code solving some problem, you at least memorized a solution and somewhat understood it.

Maybe you trust engineers to be completely transparent, but then you also let in a different kind of "brilliant jerk" (as you put it) who learnt to fake interest.

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