This is fundamentally not a problem with leetcode. If it wasn't leetcode, it would have been something else. The problem is interviewers are trying to do their job with the least amount of effort.

Real life analogy of a live coding interview: "Here's a problem, I'm gonna stand here and watch you solve it in a couple of minutes, but no stress, if you don't make it fast enough, you get fired."

Every company I worked for that required leetcode problems, turned out to be toxic in some way. Every company that I worked for that didn't and instead asked questions relevant to the role, ended up being much better places to work. Just my own personal experience.

Another HUGE problem is non-FANG companies starting to use leetcode for their interviews because they want to copy these massive FANG companies and be perceived as them. All this does is make it harder for people to actually get a job. Imagine you have to do hard leetcode just to get hired at a small company. This just destroys the industry.

Great video! In 27 years of programming, I've never once been presented with a customer problem that required a software solution within a few minutes or a few lines of code, or that *could* be solved without first spending many, many days understanding the nuances of the problem. The real test of a programmer is seeing how familiar they are with consuming and outputting CSV 😝

I agree with you on this. 99% of my job as a software engineer involves simple code. If I come across a problem that requires some algorithm that I don't remember, I can research it when I need it.

I do embedded systems. I write C code to control real world inputs/outputs. In 25 years, I've NEVER had to do anything with searching or strings; but that's what all the interviewers ask about.

The really annoying thing is that a lot of the jobs that require leetcode interview problems DONT EVEN REQUIRE THAT LEVEL/STYLE OF PROGRAMMING. If you're hiring for a front end developer position, you aren't writing these complex algos. Guarantee someone has already written a module that works 'good enough' to solve your problem faster than it would take you to sit down and write out your own. Not only that but they skip critical skills actually necessary to do the job in favor of leetcode garbage. I had team members who passed leetcode interviews but didn't know CSS for a front end developer position!!

I'm old enough to remember when software development was fun. What happened?!?

As a Full-Stack software dev working for small/medium companies I found that learning stuff like software architecture and coding patterns was much more beneficial than learning algorithms and data structures for these are mostly already applied on the frameworks and its internal methods that I use. Technical interviews for small/medium companies that require leet code type deep knowledge are definitely not realistic.

Testing algorithms and data structures in job interview for a senior dev... Yeah, it's still happening. In my career (15 y) I've had to use typical algorithmic approach maybe a couple of times. The most difficult part is not even memorizing how e.g. streams work in Java or how particular framework works. Most difficult thing in software dev is to read code which is already written and expanding it. Second hardest thing is to resolve bugs of external frameworks and libraries and address exceptional cases.

Thank you for this. I was caught up in the game industry layoffs at the beginning of the year and EVERY SINGLE interview used leetcode or something similar. I've been a software engineer for around 20 years now and cant tell you the last time i hand-coded quick sort or a red-black tree... but those were the types of questions asked. Never mind that a candidate has worked in multiple languages across multiple industries... "if they cant code a quick sort in 15 minutes, we dont want them". I've been on the hiring side in the past and I think the combination of leetcode questions on timed, web based, non-interactive tests are completely worthless for anyone with experience. I'd much rather a candidate walk me through a problem they solved in the past and we have a conversation where they explain the problem, solution, why they chose the solution, how they discovered the solution, etc. But that takes time and hiring managers who also have a clue.... which seems to be more and more rare.

I think leetcode is misused by interviewers who themself don't know much about coding. When I was involved in the hiring process in my previous company we asked a candidate to bring a project they have worked on (privately) and present it to us. We then did a little live code review and asked based on that project how the candidate would implemented a change that comes out throughout the presentation and review. You learn much more about the person and if it is not their own code you will be able to tell. But such an interview process requires experienced coders taking part in the interview as well.

When I was in college these were called programming puzzles or programming contest problems. They're like daily brain stretching exercises. No one ever thought of them as job tests because you almost never run into a need to write this kind of stuff. And you wouldn't actually want to inflict some tight recursive backtracking function on the codebase or your colleagues. If you're using it as a test you're probably just looking for gatekeeping techniques to find people who like the same kind of puzzles you do or went to the same school. Not looking for software developers.

TLDR: Leetcode in itself is a haven of learning software engineering. If you enjoy leetcoding to a certain degree, you're on the right path. Grinding the hell out of Leetcode while not enjoying it at all just because these fucking corporates set their shitty interviews that way is the real problem. I myself was benefitted immensely after spending hours on Leetcode, because I like doing it and learnt a whole lot of new concepts along the way. My programming skills certainly skyrocketed and so did my problem solving skills. It also makes you think more low-level about creating your subroutines for a given problem.

We chose to use a code review for our interview process. We give the candidate a hypothetical ticket and the PR that was submitted against it and ask them to go to town with the red pen. The PR itself is a grab bag of errors we see people commonly making. We chuck in errors in coding style, forget to add unit tests, reimplement a standard library feature because the engineer didn’t consult the docco, nest if/else, basic SQL errors that would deliver a subtly incorrect result, pointless over abstraction, total lack of abstraction, use of inefficient pattern at an architectural level, use of spaghetti algo to solve some real life data requirement, etc The most important thing I look for is the tone of the candidates responses. In our teams view of the world, PR’s should be treated like pair coding and a spirit of collaboration is required. One word feedback like “No.” or know-it-alls who take pointless “I’ll die on this hill” positions over trivial or subjective code are the reason PR’s can spend a eternity in review, killing you velocity. Conversely we get people who are awesome at writing greenfield code but lack ability around reading other people’s code, and they are the reason teams, despite requiring two lgtm’s and a trip through QA, still manage to push trivial bugs. This kind of process isn’t going to work for a lot of teams given their processes and structure, but for us we have found it gives us the most accurate real world idea of what that person is going to be like when we dump them in the jockeys saddle.

The problem is not LeetCode. The problem is that there are a lot of people responsible for interviewing who simply don't have the skills to do so. They see 'Outsourcing' the responsibility of interviewing to LeetCode as a lazy way out but it is abrogating their responsibilities and putting organisations at considerable risk. Whenever I interview people, I structure questions in ways that will very quickly reveal whether a candidate knows their stuff or not and to what depth. Any competent interviewer should be able to do this. If they can't, the management of an organisation shouldn't be risking the future of their organisation by exposing these people to interviewees.

While I agree that memorizing solutions of LeetCode to pass an interview is bad in ways mentioned in the video, understanding COMMON APPROACHES to write a solution that is memory and space efficient can save so much cost especially using cloud services that base total cost depending on how LONG your code takes to run and how much memory it needs. (reduces the need for scaling vertically or horizontally.) simply, memorizing is NOT the objective you should aim for when learning LeetCode, rather understanding the idea on how to forge an efficient code should be.

I can pretty much code anything thrown my way but fail miserably at leetcode interviews. My mind overthinks thing, I panic, and I fail. I also noticed that at places I worked that implemented leetcode it gave us people who could answer tricky questions but couldn’t code their way out of a paper bag and would miss such obvious things an experience dev would get. Do interviewers want someone who can write scalable enterprise software or answer tricky questions?

Interviews generally are terrible. Had one recently ask me in the context of structuring a website, "what would that look like?". Realised after the interview he meant what would it look like in an architectural or project organization way, ...I think. But as this was right off the back of discussing UIs, I talked about he actual GUI. This seems to happen a lot, people have a "I know what I mean" question, but forget that I can't read their thoughts, so they need to be explicit in asking the question clearly. And follow up and clarify instead of just going silent and being like "oh they didn't answer correctly".

Grinding leetcode is like learning scales on the piano in order to join an industry where you're supposed to write symphonies like Beethoven, given time. When you're in the engineering environment, it doesn't work like that day to day... ever... not even in FANG... (trust me on this, I work there). I've also worked with incredibly competent engineers who, when made redundant, were asked leetcode style questions by small companies who 'think they're Google'. He didn't get the job, confidence so utterly destroyed that he thought he should change industry. On the other hand, the best interview for engineering I ever had was surrounded with questions like: "You live in a country which drives on the left. The government put you in charge of a new initiative to change the traffic system so everyone drives on the right. So... how would you go about it?". You start proposing logistical solutions and in collaboration with the interviewer, you go down the rabbit hole probing the weaknesses with your idea and you collaboratively change the plan and correct your thinking as the interviewer finds holes in your solutions. It's not about 'correctness'. It's about mental agility and can you think flexibly and creatively. You can't study for this, and basically the intake of candidates was from people of all walks of life - not just Comp Sci. I got the job and worked with amazing people who were trained in astrophysics, art and textile design. They still work in the industry, some of the best engineers I ever worked with. While anyone can be a trained monkey, I prefer to work with creative intelligent people and this was (as intimidating as it was) the BEST interview process I have ever come across. The company by the way is a household name and extremely successful in the UK to this very day.

These problems are perfect for ChatGPT. You don’t need a software engineer for them.

Strong correlation between Leetcode interview questions and Toxic workplace environment.

Excellent! With decades of experience, I rarely had to implement data structure algorithms. The biggest problems were understanding the stakeholders, managing expectations, solving the lack of documentation on systems, and other non-coding tasks. You nailed it. It’s the thinking that matters. Everything in engineering is dependent on managing constraints

I had interview where instead of LeetCode they gave me frameworks that I had never seen before and asked me to code some features to some dummy 100-200 lines long web app they've created. And what they wanted to see was who well I can read the documentation of framework that I have not seen before and how well I can figure things out - they didn't even care that I finish the solution within given time limit. Since I am not a math person I was fine with it because math questions to me would mean that I could only pass them within time limit if I have memorized it before. But with frameworks if you have general understanding, you will get a ton of hints from autocomplete alone so it's much easier for me and much better for company because my real job wasnt to code algorithms.

It does seem rather pointless using LeetCode because many problems need to be thought out and not just coding a solution from memory! They need to use a real-world problem and give the candidate a test to see if they can problem-solve the answer using reason. This would be a better determination of their coding ability!

Leetcode is practice, it's not something you want to memorize

Interviewers seem to not care that these problems are kinda based on CS Data Structures & Algorithms and lots of SWE's don't have formal qualifications, yet the interviewers wants you code like a CS dev when it's not required IRL.

IMO, leetCode is great for getting practice questions and storing up on strategies to efficiently solve unnatural problems using data structures and a few algorithms. The issue with the industry is the interviewers. Now it's no secret that you need some math skill to be able to solve some problems efficiently while building software, heck you might need it with something as trivial as a clip-path in CSS, however for sometime now the number of math Olympiad style questions masqueraded as DSA (data structures and algorithms) problems has increased greatly on the platform and interviewers might pick that because it has a low acceptance rate or it just seems too hard for a junior engineer to pass. That's where I draw the line. If a question isn't relying solely on data structures and algorithms knowledge to solve it, and might require some specific math knowledge (for example combinatorics), then in my opinion, it's a screening interview where only the math-heads get through unfortunately.

Leetcode is not bad practise, overuse of it is and ignoring others aspects of Software Engineering is.

I’m subscribing to your channel because you don’t hold back, wonderful to hear your perspective. Keep it up!

I have worked with people who solve everything in the LeetCode style and it is horrible, they end up with complicated and untestable code even for the easiest problems.

Software engineers from all countries - unite! in order to change the rules of the game and keep the high salaries

I've been a developer for 20 years, and I've never had a situation where I only have 10 minutes to devise a solution to a problem. This style of interviewing is certainly horrible. Great video!

So glad I'm at the end of my programming career rather than at the start! No way I'd get a job today. Back in the day when I was interviewing programmers for a job, we got tired of getting programmers who only knew how to code in theory but had really not put in the time at the computer (i.e. could hardly use the keyboard). In the end I started giving a typing test so we could see if we were getting BSed! :) I guess things have escalated from there!

Love your commentaries. And am glad you didn't edit out that thing near the beginning. Retired / burned out software eng here. I never had to do much with Leetcode, it was mostly after my time. Though I am giving some of these LeetCode questions to one of my students. I think he needs to know what he is going to face.

The company I work for found that there’s a correlation between how well someone answer DSA questions and how well someone answers system design. Might just be because they’re probably interview prepped more but we hope that DSA knowledge bleeds into system design, which kinda makes sense when choosing the right database for the problem.

Coding exercises are generally a waste of time because you can make/contribute to functioning projects instead. Leetcode questions teach you next to nothing about broader project structure and working with other people's code.

Right now, I think the software job market needs to strike a balance. It seems DSA is more of an excuse to reduce the number of applicants or some form of hazing ritual. If an applicant is tested for basic DSA and then moves on to the core of the job requirement, it will be a more balanced process.

In Leetcode training, there's an elephant in the room: a perfect Leetcode interview candidate is a chatbot that scanned all the Leetcode canned answers as its training data set. Faster, less expensive than a biological programmer, doesn't complain, doesn't ask for a raise, no unemployment insurance, etc.. This means clever, productive, ingenious programmers will be replaced by Leetcode-trained people. Then the latter will be replaced by AI.

Most refreshing KZfaq video I have seen in such a long time. Keep making these kind of video'sDee

the problem isn't just leetcode. at my company we use IKM. the problem with IKM is that it tests for an extremely specific skillset, when the job requires multiple skillsets. so we always overtest and always undertest because the company refuses to administer (read: pay for) the multiple required tests. got so bad for my time i just say ok, 30 minute interview and a thorough check of your CV and i'll take the risk. for the most junior only. for the more senior i do a vague take-home test. the idea is i don't have to tell you to use SOLID and Clean architecture if you're really a senior, it's really how you fill in the technical blanks...

LeetCode monkey dance is like playing fast rounds of chess for spinal surgeon interview. It's good if you win most of them in general, but why not test skills that will be actually used during spinal surgery.

I like leetcode for challenges against friends, but agree that it isn't a great interview tool

When I saw this video I was initially very skeptical. However, as a software developer of 30 years I agree with everything you say here. It seems you are giving out genuinely relevant advice and not just looking for clicks/views like some other KZfaq "developers"

Imagine being able to solve 1000 Leetcode problems just to not being able to center a div.

Gold Star for this ! Thanks.

Completely agree with your assessment. Being able to identify when an algorithm is required, what data is needed, and how the feature integrates into the larger application is far more important. You can search or just use pre-built implementations (that are already proven and tested) of most algorithms. You can't do the same for application/solution design.

As far as I can tell from more than three decades working in the IT business, we do not have leetcode-like interview questions at all in the hiring process here in Germany. We don't ask them, we don't have to answer them. I just recently discovered leetcode on my journey to learn Rust, and took some problems there as exercises on how to do that in Rust. I found that quite helpful. The work on one problem even evolved into a small example of computer generated art. It was fun.

I had the best job ever! It was kind of a niche. I was programming in Groovy; a language none of my colleagues new about and it required fluent English which I also am. The coding problem I was given was a homework exercise. No timing. No stress. It also was written in such a way that the concepts in the problem were ones I would be seeing on the job. I have worked there for 3 whole years, but my contract ended a month ago. Now, I am back looking for a "normal" job in software development and needing to solve these leetcode problems as fast as possible!

Thanks for the video ❤

As a fullstack engineer at a fortune 500 company, I can confidently say that my day to day work pretty much NEVER involves writing algorithms or solving Leetcode-style problems. My experience has been much more geared towards interfacing with APIs, processing real-world data, and managing deployments in complex microservice ecosystems. Leetcode doesn't do a good job of teaching programmers practical skills, in my opinion.

How does adding numbers backwards work? Do you expect a different answer as opposed to just adding the two numbers?

Just a technical question: why has this video only 360p in the video quality list?

Thank you so much for the advice, I do struggle with Leet codes and finds it not as helpful as it seems in real life experience.

i do leetcode for fun to take a break from usual SWE tasks, and tbh I must say the platform itself I quite like. It's the culture, like you mentioned, which is the issue

Thank you! I'm so sick of this. Meta was the worst genuinely recommended I read "Cracking the Coding Interview" (an over 600 page leetcode style book) twice. Apple was somewhat similar though it felt more off the cuff. As someone who plans interviews I give candidates problems that look like the ones we actually solve on a day to day basis, and ramp up the ambiguity with seniority. (That said, on my latest job hunt I've seen companies who do it even better and might be stealing techniques from them in the future).

I've been a software developer/engineer for close to 20 years and now I am currently in a FAANG company and I can tell you that such trivia questions are rarely what you will be doing on a day to day basis. The more important skill is the problem solving. You know.. The VERY THING Leet code is trying to determine. Being able to collaborate, think and talk through problems is way more important. Efficiently writing and communicating ideas is also a really useful skill. That said, doing leet code to build your Datastructures and Algorithms knowledge is definitely helpful. But we are way past that point with the current Leet Code culture between companies and interviewees

Leetcode is basically a puzzle site to me that I do for fun.

I didn't know LeetCode at all and in an interview I was asked three questions by the platform. They weren't really difficult and in the end it's fun to solve such tasks. I think that's exactly what the companies want to find out, i.e. whether you enjoy it and how you approach such tasks. They don't want people to practice up and down a platform like this. I'm sorry, every developer should be able to solve the simple to intermediate tasks without having to practise.

TLDR: leetcode is for other smarter people out there, who can generalize rather than memorize a solution

I've been in software engineering for decades. I'd never heard of leetcode, lol. I've interviewed hundreds of times. And the way you describe problem solving irl is how I see it. It's usually a set of trade offs. Not a very specific graph theory problem with a single very specific solution.

One thing I like about leetcode is you can see other people's solutions, analyze them and discover some new tricks which might make your code look nicer or work better. They're sorted by performance and it can really help to adopt better practices in my opinion. But of course grinding and memorizing solutions it's something opposite of programming. I didn't even know it was a thing.

I know this isn't the point of the video, but ive never used leetcode, but after seening the examples you gave in the video I might give it a try. Don't get me wrong, i have 0 aspirations to get into faang, nor am I the "grind for interviews" type, but solving the problems sounds kinda fun.

Swe in the past are master of DSA because that’s how they optimized our computers to work under constraints. From making an OS, designing underlying architecture like cache, instructions scheduling. Now we only have to solve a couple of puzzle problems and we are complaining?

The biggest markers of success for most of the types of corporate engineering jobs out there have less to do with accumulated knowledge in a specific domain, and more to do with being resourceful and having the ability learn quickly and produce results when working with unfamiliar tools/tech stacks/code bases while also facing a deadline.

This highlights the difference between a "coder" and a "developer"/Engineer! When I was responsible for hiring developers/Engineers I wanted to see how the candidates approached the problem, first. If they just jumped directly into coding, I would stop them and ask them to explain their analysis of the problem first. If they couldn't it was a hard pass.

Never used leat code. Self taught myself code and just landed a job 💪🏻

I am pretty sure she is actively practicing leetcode

Leetcode is a good way to get better at a programming language and writing efficient code snippets. If you do a few questions each week you can get pretty good.

My typical workday contains three questions: 1) What's actually is our problem? 2) Can we fix it? 3) Should we fix it? Fixing anything has often a ton of side effects that you need to consider. So you need to communicate A LOT with stakeholders. Question and Answer riddles like these are unrealistic, because in reality you don't even have the question.

I haven't done a huge amount of these types of problems, probably a few dozen or maybe a hundred across various types of lessons and exercises I've done. I have done more maths exercises in my life and much more chess puzzles. As I understand it these types of problems have the following didactic purpose, in descending order of importance. 1. Help understand concepts. Hearing about a tree, or a hashmap is one thing, but implementing it is different. It's possible to think you understand without really understanding, but after you solve a few representative problems you know you at least understand it well enough. Or if you get stuck you know you have some work to do. 2. Help internalize concepts. This is especially important if these concepts are later going to be a small part of a larger picture. If there is one or two elements of the larger picture that give you pause, you can still piece it together, but it shouldn't be too many. The datastructure and algorithmic side is one side that might give you pause, and if it doesn't you are one step ahead. It will probably be easier to spar with stakeholders if you can quickly think about solutions in your head and that's easier if you've solved some similar problems before. 3. Speed. The first benefit of speed is that you can solve a problem faster, and the second and underrated benefit is that you can explore more options if you can code your options quickly. I have limited sympathy for the idea that leetcode problems abstract away many factors of real life coding. That's sort of the point. You focus on one part of it, to teach yourself that precise part. This only becomes a problem if little practice problems become the only type of study you do. People who know how to learn will supplement this with theoretical reading or viewing that the exercises are hopefully paired with, and with bigger personal projects (coding your own apps for practice, for example), studying important tools, design patters and so on. Unfortunately a lot of people study these problems for a fourth reason: to do well on important tests. Job interviews in this case. Studying for a test is usually not didactically sound. In this case it leads to internalizing concepts beyond any need and memorizing problems instead of understanding the concepts.

Pretty sure this whole debacle was a sinfully effective marketing campaign that has gotten everyone fucked up. For a software company you want as smart a person as you can, with good communication skills but effectively no spine. They arent gonna tell you "no that's a dumb idea, let us not do that" they are just gonna take nootropics and not sleep till they come up with an answer. But you cant say that or your interview will get gamed. Leetcode acts as a cultural barrier and an IQ test. It only tells the interviewer if the person is from the culture of the founders. As a smaller business owner you don't want this, its how you end up with a daycare and then a union.

To make it short, most programming tasks revolve around either being able to reduce real world problems into puzzles to be solved with programming, or communicating with a team of people working on a very large puzzle and making sure your solution is collaborative with those of others. Hiring the puzzle solving savants won't necessarily make for a functional programming department.

Are you saying that people who don't know how to use a for loop learn enough loops by heart to pass an interview but not enough to actually solve problems and explain why they do things the way they do?

I can bounce a ball 200 times on my head. Yet Real Madrid won't hire me.

I don't code any more - moved to management roles. When I did I only ever got one coding test in an interview. It was to sort a list of words - I was 8 years into my career by this point, so I racked my brain and implemented Bubble Sort. But, in reality - pretty much any sorting that I did in real life was already in a database - so my 'real world answer' was select * from customer sort by last name ( or whatever ). I got the job, and it turned out to be pretty good. Although, funnily enough the code base I was given to work on was a complete disaster. I feel sorry for people younger than me needing to go through a grind like this and need to rote learn - part of the joy of software engineering is solving different problems and not needing to rote learn.

LC is good for learning CS. That's it.

Leetcode is only for interviews it's not the actual job. Need to start looking at how to interview people for the job.

As a Product Leader who has not written code for over a decade - you are so right. As a hiring manager who has hired over 100 people over the years - you are so right. A good software engineer always asks clarifying questions on edge cases and failure modes. After all, with big data even a small percentage of edge cases, is still a lot of edge cases…

First of all, I agree with what you are saying. I do just want to mention this…I’m self taught and did most of a career in music education before switching to software dev. Leetcode was a great teaching tool in the transition. I only did it for a few months, and not intently. It was great at helping me understanding the big o complexity problem, and I use a lot of the skills I learned there to this day. Maybe there was a better way to learn that, but for me, being able to dive through linked lists and binary trees was super helpful down the road when dealing with optimization problems that surfaced as my app grew. For the record though, I no longer subscribe to leetcode.

If I ever make an algorithm at work that does anything abstract it’s mainly my own doing. Most jobs at work just require going through large amounts of info and grooming it, or making a front end for data entry

25 years ago I had an interview which included a variant of "sort items in alphabetical order", the wrinkle being it was using pen and paper, no computer. I quickly devised something and wrote it down, then finished up and left. I realised in the way home that my algorithm didn't really do that. "Oh well", I thought, "won't get that one". I got the job. First day, I said, "that code of mine didn't do what you wanted, how come I got the job?" They replied "You were the only candidate who tried" The moral being, it doesn't have to be the most amazing code (or even work) if you can explain your thinking clearly.

The thing is even in Hungary, many small companies and scaleups are doing Leetcode style interview, which you would say that doesn't make any sense. They are not FAANG, they are small and cheap attitude companies and they still do it.

I assume that most software engineers will have a related college degree in CS, CE, etc. Won't they have already learned the algo's and data structures in their college courses?

Just found your channel - very nice. Did not hear about LeetCode, maybe because I didn't do interviews for the last 15 years... May I be the devil's advocate for a second? First, don't blame "companies". There are people there. Interviewers. Blame us. Yes, I say "us", because I'm an interviewer. Now, as an interviewer, I have a problem. I need to know whether the person that stands in front of me is someone that would help the project that I'm working on. If he does, that's great. If he doesn't, most chances are that he/she would suck my time, my patience, and maybe my life. Really, it's that bad. A bad developer is not just contributing nothing, it is also taking away from everyone's time, making everything more difficult. Now, how do we solve this issue? And in 2 hours? Well, first I would like to hear something that candidate did in the past. I want deep understanding in that project. I want to hear about the various options you could have taken, what you did, and whether it was good or bad. I will be able to know whether you are BSing me. Any person who did a big project have scars from bad decisions. I want to hear those scars, those cannot be faked. Second, I need to see you code. Not fast, not 100% accurate, but code. With different approaches to solving the problem. If you show me one approach, that is the complicated one which is the solution, I will figure out you know the problem already. And, of course, I will ask you many questions about the solution. If you copied the solution, I will know. This is how I solve the problem. If you think of a better way, please let me know.

People seem remarkably weak on basic computer sci these days. At interview I asked if 0xAA was odd or even? Some candidates were foxed by the question.

This is refreshing. Some exercises such as 2some is well worth learning.

One big fat like for one big fat rant! I'm a dev with 3.5 years of experience, built quite a bit of projects, got pretty decent at 2 programming languages in addition to my main one, and gained cloud expertise. Why the fk do I need to solve leetcode problems to prove my worth? Sick of this shit.

I’ve been doing leetcode everyday for a couple months. Don’t know if it will ever lead to work, but I’m thoroughly enjoying it. It’s like doing the crossword puzzle for me.

I'm guessing it was about 40 years ago (I'm retired now), I interviewed at a company where they gave me a problem to solve in C. At the that time, it was normal to just write out your code with pencil and paper. In any event, my interviewer looked at my code and agreed that I solved the problem, but dug into me for not solving it the way it was written in the K & R (bible?). She then spent the rest of the interview impressing on me that her masters degree from a big university was enough to judge my work as an expert. I remained polite but was glad to leave.

Interviewers need to stop being lazy and create their own role specific coding questions. Your subject domain probably has some problem in it that requires data structures and/or algorithms. Derive a question from that. If your domain doesn’t have anything remotely complicated then why are you asking leet code questions in the first place?

When I interviewed for big tech, the recruiters told me to read Programming Interviews Exposed, where it explains that talking about the thinking process and asking the right questions is important. I also was a Google employee and we didn't use Leetcode problems to interview people, we were actively told to choose problems that were not in that kind of websites. Overall I am happy that someone finally talks about this issue, I'm planning to talk about that as well.

Agree with your take that solving thousands of similar small problems does not really help in the real world when you are faced with a problem you've never seen yet. The approach you take to tackle these problems, is all the difference between a successful software engineer / dev and those who will not get it.

4:45 This question is unclear it could mean a number of things, it says that each node contains one digit, however we can tell this is not strictly one digit because that would not allow it to also contain a reference to the next and previous node which means that they really mean it must contain at least one digit, this means the whole number could be stored in a single node of a 1 length list or it could be infinitely long which leads to there being infinite ways to interpret the question from thereon, it also does not tell the base the numbers are stored in, this means that it accurately could store a number like 314 without having more than one digit if it is in base 314, additionally it is also possible that it could be storing the next and previous node references encoded directly into the single digit but it did not explicitly say this leading to another possible interpretation, it does not say how the resulting linked list should be stored, and also it does not tell where the decimal point is so we can not know whether the nodes 1, 4, and 1 are 1.41 or 141. I could go on, but I haven't the time at this moment.

This is how the sys/net admin for Microsoft/Cisco exams (used to) work(s). I hope they finally fixed those

Leetcode aslso assumes that their tests are canoical. For example, for some of the problems, you can solve them using floating points or you can solve them using integers. Of course, if you solve those problems using integers you will get exact solutions, but if you solve them using floating points you may have answers that are off by a little. Leet code assumes that you are using floating points, so if you are off by the same amount, then it is ok - if you solve it using integers operations some of the test cases will fail.

Did I ever have to add numbers backward at work? No But one time we needed an automation suite converted from c# to Java and I was able to automate about 90% of it. Everyone was manually looking at logs to see timings manually and I parsed the logs to generate graphs over time. Everyone is studying for the aws prep exam, but I'm the only one who made a flashcard app with graduated interval recall. All this required algorithms that other people seem to struggle with more than me for some reason

Back in the 1990's I had one very cool hiring test. It started with abstract symbols, then it got more and complex basically building a programming language. It was a test to see if you as a developer could learn new things fast you never saw before.

I will do the devils advocate and say that leetcode style questions are an OK 20 minute process to assess someone’s coding skills. I am not in favor of asking any complicated DP of Graph questions (unless you use these kind of algorithms in your product). As an interviewer I ask usually something very simple like “write me a key value data structure” (for the majority of people crying it’s a map) and then I start adding complexity to it. It gives me an insight how the candidate is thinking in advance and adapts their code to new requirements. I believe the issue with Leetcode questions comes because of skill issue from both candidates that only memorize/don’t understand the solutions and interviewers that don’t know how to drive an interview.