| Just be fine with failing a bunch until you find a company not using such obviously bad interview techniques. Don’t waste time on leetcode / HackerRank / etc. It’s not useful. Practice programming by writing code you enjoy, solving problems you are interested in. You’ll be naturally productive at what you enjoy, and just build on that. Anybody giving advice that comes from the point of view that these interview techniques have any legitimacy is probably just someone who happens to randomly be good at or enjoys interview trivia, and so their opinion is clouded by a selection bias effect. This is especially true on Hacker News. They do well on interviews, not because their study methods work better and not because they are better at engineering or more effective in a job. They are not. They just benefit randomly from a system set up to reward traits they happen to have already and find easy. Their ideas worked for them but are very unlikely to work for you. Seriously, just do a lot of interviews, fail a lot, and be fine with it. It’s easier said than done, but it’s necessary for you to weed out the places with foolish interview practices and find the ones which are more holistic, human productivity focused, flexible, etc. I happen to be good at quickly working through algorithms, mostly in machine learning and search data structures, but in general software too. If anyone tries to hire me because of that quick “see how you think” whiteboard nonsense, I just walk away. They are doing it wrong; life’s too short. |