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by evanspa
1596 days ago
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I'm in my 40s doing the leetcode grind, but weird thing is, I'm actually ENJOYING it. I get a little high when I solve a problem, and I feel good about re-learning / re-discovering data structures and algorithms that I just don't use on a day-to-day basis. I paid for the premium version and enjoy reading the solutions and maybe learning a new trick or algorithm technique or whatnot. And who knows, maybe something that I learn when grinding on some leetcode problem will actually be useful in my day job? Thinking about it, if I ever do land a MAANG job, I don't think I'll stop doing leetcode problems. Sure, I won't go crazy with it like I'm cramming for mid-terms or something, but I'll still hack on them for the pure joy of problem solving, for the sake of problem solving. I guess where I'm going with this is, maybe change your thinking about leetcode? Don't think of it as a necessary evil in order to land a high paying job that you dread doing each night; look at it as a fun little hobby, with the nice side-effect that you're keeping your data structure knowledge, algorithms and general problem solving skills sharp. |
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Like my past studying for SAT or LSAT, it was as much about preparing myself for the test itself vs. trying to gain some specific knowledge. Time management, making sure to test, and knowing that there are almost always naive vs. optimized solutions for these types of problems and learning how to quickly identify the naive solution (i.e prove I can solve) and then figuring out the optimization.
In any case, I enjoyed the process and didn't really practice more than 10-15 hours. I literally just kicked off the rust and got used to managing time. If you get too deep in to "I've optimized systems to process millions of transactions/second, and some 25 year old is sweating me on hashtables" you're going to have a bad time.
The ironic part of the interviews at this level of experience was that the coding portions ended up feeling tough, but I was able to talk work through them. For one company, one of the two system design round was with someone who couldn't have been more than 3 years out of college (with PhD though) and had only been at that big company. That was my hardest interview because the person I was talking to had zero to little actual experience there. They knew the problem and expected answer, but didn't know the space. It was VERY HARD to talk about things that they very obviously didn't understand in terms that they did understand without sounding condescending.