[EnderMB]

I'll probably get a lot of shit for this, but LeetCode.

I've recently been furloughed, and I think that redundancies aren't too far away. There aren't many companies hiring in my area at the moment, and if I'm going to move it's going to be for a big company, so I'm dusting off the CV and am applying to some Big N companies.

A recruiter recently reached out to me, and I've got an interview with one Big N company coming up soon, so am using my new-found free time to study and, at the very least, be a bit more employable at the end of this pandemic.

[typon]

I don't hate you I pity you. Applied for Big N jobs last year, had to study leetcode for 1 month and I hated my life. I was legit depressed. I was already so busy at work and coming home to do leetcode just killed all motivation and happiness in my life. Did well enough to get to on site interviews but didn't get a full time offer from any of them. Such is life :(

[dominotw]

I used to hate leetcode with passion because i associated it with being a failure in career.

I started leetcoding just for enjoyment and not for landing a FAANG job, when i had no interviews coming up. I started enjoying it a little bit and now i do it for "fun" and don't have an anatagonist realationship to it.

Like someone said, once you overcome something you have keep overcoming it, so you can never be successful if your strategy is overcoming.

[gonehome]

It feels like studying for the SAT for me (something I also struggled really investing in). At least it’s more valuable than the SAT in the skills you develop.

It can be really hard to motivate yourself to jump through hoops.

[scarface74]

I use to hate the idea of studying leetCode and I still refuse to do it. But then I realized how hypocritical I was being considering all of the time I’ve spent “grinding architecture and infrastructure”, reading white papers and studying videos on TOGAF so I could talk the talk on an “Enterprise Architect” or a “Digital Transformation Consultant”. But if I have to play a game to get the next salary upgrade after I top out as an IC in my local market (not the West Coast), that’s what I had to do. Who knows? I might end up working in consulting at AWS or Azure.

But now, with the entire world economy screwed up, I don’t think now is the right time to make that kind of move. I’ll stick with being just a regular old Enterprise Developer/Architect/Team Lead/Single Responsible Individual depending on how the wind blows focusing on healthcare.

[crimsonalucard]

Architecture is way easier than algorithms. I'm actually the opposite. I hate the idea that people are studying intensely for architecture because it just takes reading the wikipedia summary to get the main point.

Architects are usually just managers who are ex-engineers and have been out of the front lines for so long that they aren't technical enough to get back into coding. This is fine, but the idea that "architecture" is some kind of talent is absurd. Anyone can study a blog article about the latest architecture buzzword and understand the concepts front to back. Not to mention that the more physical nature of architecture makes it less flexible than code itself so "architectural" patterns are, as a result, significantly less abstract and complex than coding patterns/algorithms.

The true difference in ability is measured by who can actually Build an architecture, and usually its developers who build it, while architects (mostly) just talk about it.

[scarface74]

Not to mention that the more physical nature of architecture makes it less flexible than code itself so "architectural" patterns are, as a result, significantly less abstract and complex than coding patterns/algorithms.

This is the reason that software engineers need adult supervision. The fact that you think that modern infrastructure is physical and static displays a lack of experience. There is nothing static about modern cloud infrastructure.

I just had to deploy an API to ECS/Fargate (Docker). We had to determine the best combination of memory/cpu of the Fargate runtime environment and what hardware we wanted to give the ElasticSearch environment. I basically wrote a CloudFormation template (infrastructure as code) that defined the environment and then wrote a Node script that ran the CF template and passed in parameters to vary the hardware environment (cpu/memory). After the environment was created, the script then ran a series of Artillery load tests, recorded the results of the load tests, gathered metrics from CloudWatch and estimated the monthly cost compared to the performance.

We reported that to management to let them decide how much they were willing to spend for the throughout they needed.

I’ve created entire environments with databases, Redis Caches, ECS clusters (think AWS version of EKS), etc as a proof of concept by using CloudFormation deploying code to it, showing management as a demo, and then tearing it all down just by clicking delete until we can come back to it after the contract is signed and then spin it back up with one command.

[crimsonalucard]

>This is the reason that software engineers need adult supervision. The fact that you think that modern infrastructure is physical and static displays a lack of experience. There is nothing static about modern cloud infrastructure.

Note how I said "more physical nature," meaning that it's closer to physical but not completely physical. Either way, all abstractions suffer from leakage from the physical world. Data and processes, while seemingly abstract all occupy physical and temporal space and this fact leaks to all layers of the stack. Thus, technically, everything in the universe including computation is physical and nothing is ever purely a virtual entity.

Honestly, you think I don't know about docker? You think I don't know about the cloud? "Infrastructure as code" oooh buzzwords, you're just using a shittier domain specific language to write something that you can also do with Regular code (such as python, no buzzwords needed).

Give me a break, what web developer doesn't know about the above stuff? None.

>I just had to deploy an API to ECS/Fargate (Docker). We had to determine the best combination of memory/cpu of the Fargate runtime environment and what hardware we wanted to give the ElasticSearch environment. I basically wrote a CloudFormation template (infrastructure as code) that defined the environment and then wrote a Node script that ran the CF template and passed in parameters...................

OK, the stuff you did isn't even usually what a "architect" does. It's devops. An architect just diagrams the boxes and lines and gives it to the devops guy to spit out working infrastructure or a POC. But that's besides the point...

Can you write your own programming language? Can you write your own database? Can you write your own Operating System? These are actual specialties (none of which involve "architecture"), not some garbage made up specialty like "architect." At the very least, if you want to be part of an actual specialty in the IT world you need to build shit and that shit needs to be HARD to build, you can't just do some easy diagraming of a bunch of stuff while acting like you have some superior understanding of the latest architecture pattern you can look up on wikipedia.

[perfectspiral]

>Honestly, you think I don't know about docker? You think I don't know about the cloud? "Infrastructure as code" oooh buzzwords, you're just using a shittier domain specific language to write something that you can also do with Regular code (such as python, no buzzwords needed).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

[idoby]

Well, using general Turing-complete code languages for infra and config vs specialized templates/languages is a legit point of contention in the industry right now, although judging by the style, GP isn't considering the pros and cons of each approach, which include:

* Forcing users to learn a specialized language vs reusing knowledge of a general purpose language

* Inevitable Turing-completeness creep and increasing complexity in specialized languages

* Complexity and difficulty of reasoning about general purpose code (and analyzability)

So GP does have a point. He/she is just not making it very well, I think.

[crimsonalucard]

Let's stay on topic rather than make passive aggressive comments on my intelligence.

You're implying that my comments are stupid and arrogant. Prove it if you can, let's get to the bottom of whether or not "architects" is a worthless specialty or not. I think you know I'm right and the only thing you have left are personal comments on my intelligence.

[cle]

Where I work, architects are responsible for disambiguating requirements and breaking down the implementation across teams into achievable milestones. It’s the intersection of technical chops and social skills. One of those is a lot easier to develop than the other.

A good architect makes it seem like their job is easy, but there’s nothing easy about taking a vague idea and leading a huge cross-team effort to solve it.

[crimsonalucard]

>Where I work, architects are responsible for disambiguating requirements and breaking down the implementation across teams into achievable milestones. It’s the intersection of technical chops and social skills. One of those is a lot easier to develop than the other.

Good thing we're on the internet where we can talk about the actual reality and lay everything out as it is without worrying about the social and political bureaucracy that infests corporate culture.

That being said, isn't what you described the role of the tech lead or manager? The best tech lead ultimately derives technical architecture by aggregating the expertise of the team and puts that plan into motion exactly as you said.

The term "architect" usually implies greater knowledge of "architecture" where the "architect" uses this "greater knowledge" to lay down a high level plan of the infrastructure. Additionally your initial post implied that this is what you think, because this is what you study for interviews.

Like I said, usually the architecture role is actually ends up in practice becoming an ex-engineer manager. That's the only actual role they can fit while maintaining the respect of the engineers and without being completely useless. This is basically what you described about yourself.

[scarface74]

Additionally your initial post implied that this is what you think, because this is what you study for interviews.

Thousands of people study about how to reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard and other needless leetCode to “work at a FAANG” even though they don’t do that everyday.

What you study for an interview is unfortunately often only vaguely correlated with what you do on a job.

[crimsonalucard]

>What you study for an interview is unfortunately often only vaguely correlated with what you do on a job.

Agreed 100%. Interviewing is hard. I would argue though that interviewing for "architecture" causes another issue. To give an analogy... it's like studying english for a programming job because english is used all the time on the job.

Architecture is just too easy and too obvious and if you just happen to not know a specific architecture or way of speeding something up, all you have to do is read about it on the internet like looking up vocabulary on a dictionary.

I would also argue that google isn't exactly just testing algorithmic skills in an interview. The spiritual goal of the interview is that the question they give you is novel and one you haven't seen before. The overall purpose of novel questions is to measure your raw intelligence.

The question isn't whether or not you know how to reverse a binary tree but whether or not from a state of not knowing how to do it, can you creatively come up with a way to do it in an hour? Raw IQ.

Of course the practice doesn't always match up with the ideal and often times interviewees can get lucky.

I'm not saying that this is the best way to interview. I'm saying that judging an interview based off of architecture is even worse. It's even easier and there's a lot of room for bullshit in a conversational interview as opposed to a technical question.

[grumpy8]

don't need to do leetCode just for the salary game, there are some really fun algorithms

[scarface74]

After programming in assembly for hobby for six years in middle and high school, 4 years in college, and professionally for almost 25, nothing about software development is “fun”. It’s just a way for money to appear in my bank account. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike software development, but every hour of continuous learning I do is a combination of keeping me competitive at my current level or to make more money depending on where I am in life.

[gameswithgo]

it can be a fun game, and it is a useful game. brushing up on fundamentals is useful in any human endeavor no matter how advanced you get.

[senderista]

I hate to say it, but I got no discernible advantage from my non-trivial coding projects during my last job search. My time would have been far better spent just grinding leetcode, from a purely economic perspective. I wouldn’t have had nearly as much fun, but I probably would have gotten more offers.

[returningfory]

100% percent my experience too. In the last 3 months I've been on-site at 3 of the FAANG companies. Not a single interviewer brought up the large personal projects I've done and which are given decent space on my resume; my weeks of leetcoding was definitely far far far more beneficial for getting a job.

[shitoujizu]

sometimes feels very sad about this since one's value should be reflected by the awesome projects he has done. I think it's just laziness of the FAANG companies. If the interviewer is well prepared and keeps digging the resume, then he should know the candidate is good or not. But by leetcoding, it's simpler for them, just keep asking the repeated questions.

[glouwbug]

From my personal experience, a company wants a "yes man", someone who will do as they command. From their perspective, if you can't pass (or refuse!) the coding challenge, you're already in the red flag zone. That's just how it is.

The funny thing is that a single fairly large personal project will develop your engineering skills 42 times that of the hundred something leetcode problems you solved for your FAANG interviews.

One teaches deep long term critical thinking. The other short term critical thinking. You won't see any small short sighted systems out in the real world.

[arvinsim]

I understand why FAANG does it. The problem is that other companies are just cargo culting.

[DeathArrow]

I think that if your hobby projects will be important for many people: i.e. you develop something with the importance npm, or Ruby on Rails, or Vue.js, FAANG companies will make you offers without asking you leetcode kind of questions.

[shitoujizu]

This is not true. Not so many people can set up popular and awesome projects like npm or vue.js. These are top level programers. But for other people you can not say they are not good enough to be qualified.

[cheese4242]

I read that the guy who invented Homebrew still had to go through the leetcode interview at Google (which they failed) so I'm not sure if they ever waive the interview requirements?

[DeathArrow]

Somehow I don't imagine Ken Thompson willing to answer leetcode questions. If anything, he should be the one doing the asking.

[dominotw]

they look at your resume in any seriousness after you pass leetcode rounds,

[CalRobert]

Can't imagine getting shit for studying up on what's likely to help you get a job. I'd be doing the same if I were in your situation (though if laid off I'm hoping to start my own thing).

[__s]

> I'll probably get a lot of shit for this, but LeetCode.

Don't hate the player; hate the game. gl

[gcheong]

I can't hate you for doing what you need to do to get another job, I hate that this it what interviewing has come to and the companies capitalizing off it.

[amznthrowaway5]

"I hate that this it what interviewing has come to and the companies capitalizing off it."

I for one am extremely grateful, although I think it would be even more fair if it was more like the SAT. Traditional interviews depend too much on status signaling and social connections.

[christiansakai]

After 2 years of Leetcoding and jumping ships, I finally got a job in one of the big companies. Worth it.

[brandmeyer]

Back when I was preparing to apply to a FAANG, I built a game engine as my vehicle for practice. From scratch. Well almost from scratch, if you consider bare nekkid OpenGL to still be "from scratch".

There's tons of opportunities in a game engine for exercising and honing your performance chops and your algorithm chops. It also gave me an opportunity to learn a new language and programming model - the GL shader language. Building it onto a game helps to keep it real.

Best of luck.

[ronyfadel]

I’m not too sure about algorithms?

You can get away with making a working, performant (basic) engine with some neat functionality nowadays without delving too deep into algorithms or using any advanced data structures.

It is a good exercise in “real coding” though.

[brandmeyer]

Off the top of my head, there's pathfinding on a navigation mesh, mouse hit-testing and FOV pruning with a space partitioning tree, triangle mesh sorting. You can also do some agent work by building up an automated opponent.

[why-el]

No sane person will hate on your studying, you are doing what you gotta do to survive, good luck out there friend.

[mrslave]

On LeetCode, how would you estimate the split between slogging-enldlessly-at-things-I-already-know and I-actually-learned-something?

I had never heard of it until I read the thread under your comment so I apologize if this is obvious to people in the know. From the comments it sounds like more of the former and less of the latter.

I had a good experience with Project Euler back in the day (account long since lost). There was absolutely no focus on immediate employability but there were improvements in my "human capital".

[brudgers]

Leetcode problems can be solved by extrapolation from FizzBuzz programming. They can also be solved by engineering insight of algorithms and data structures that are applicable to processes that don’t fit in RAM. That’s what makes Leetcode plausibly useful for evaluating candidates. Bad engineering will get correct output and good engineering is possible. Neither requires significantly more effort writing code.

[DeathArrow]

I did some Leetcode type stuff in high school to prepare for CS contests and at University for some CS courses.

I think they are ok if you like that kind of stuff and like to find solutions to those kind of problems. And if you have time.

Most people who hate them are grinding leetcode kind of stuff in limited time, taking away from sleep, time with family, time for rest.

If something starts feeling like a chore, maybe you are doing it the wrong way or at the wrong time.

Also, from being employable point of view, I think there are more valuable skills. I.e. if you want to work as a web developer, know a framework by heart, master a web programming language, know SQL, know HTML, CSS and JS, know some useful patterns, know about testing, SOLID, DDD, TDD, know how to use tools like GIT, JIRA, Jenkins, Docker, know REST/SOAP/gRPC, know async and parallel programming. Those were the kind of technical questions I was asked about 3 months ago when I went through 20+ job interviews. From all those only one asked a leetcode kind of question. It wasn't hard and it didn't seem like it was a make it or break it kind of question. Many years ago, when I applied for game development jobs, I was asked about Unity, C#, GPU shaders and a bit of algebra and geometry, no question was leetcode like.

[harshs08]

I would be doing the same thing if I was in your situation. Even though LeetCode is a grind, there's no way around it if you are targeting big companies.

Good Luck!

[ddoolin]

I'm also doing a data structures and algorithms course, likely followed by what will be HackerRank and LeetCode. I really don't like it but what can you do?

[kbrisso]

Good luck! I'm doing the same thing, I actually enjoy some of it, I've learned a few things too.

[non-entity]

I guess its something I'll get good at if I practice it more, but at I cant even really do leetcode easy right node despite having been a professional developer for a few years and a hobbyist for long before that. I have no C.S. background though.

Most of the times when I end up seeing the solution ot makes sense, but uses data structures in ways I wouldn't think. Part of the reason for that I think is because my daily work for one operates on much different types of data (business entities vs arbitrary collections of integers) and also because the logic in the applications I work on is not very algorithm heavy.

Another reason is because of high level abstractions I've been spoiled by. I could probably hack many of the problems together with LINQ but that's not gonna hold up very well.