| Anyone who has 35 bucks can lock themselves in a room for 3 months with a copy of CTCI and a pad of paper and come out with an 80+k salary. If anything, this just tells us what a low bar to entry the CTCI drill is. Say you had a pool of candidates of roughly comparable intelligence, educational background, and work experience. And then you gave them 3 months of all living expenses paid† to go an "improve themselves as software development professionals." One of them comes back and says "I cranked out an MVP (relying in part on a language I only barely knew to that point) that's actually being used by people, and getting good reviews. Here, check out he repo." Another says, "I thought it was about time I got a handle on this machine learning stuff. Here's a project I did, based on a generalization of some ideas in such-and-such paper. Wish I had more time to spend on it, but looks like my error rate's not too bad." And another says "It took literally 6-8 hours of devoted practice, every day. But I finally got some serious traction on Japanese. I honestly thought I'd never be able to do that." And then there's the guy who says "Oh, I looked myself in my apartment and did every exercise in CTCI. Because, you know, I heard that's what you're supposed to do. Damn, my back is sore. I think I need a better chair or something." Who would you rather talk to first? † Which costs a lot more than 35 bucks, BTW. |