[jonnycoder]

Leetcode is not superficial when nearly all companies are using leetcode as a barrier to entry these days. Many of us with 10+ years of experience did not need to practice leetcode to get hired originally, but many would fail miserably today due to the time constraint and necessity to socialize/speak the problem while solving it in 45 min. Some practice problems took me all day at first, but after a while it became a skill of quickly identifying the type of data structure to use and solving it. It's great practice.

As for LLMs, it's probably the best thing to learn right now, especially by building something. I personally believe it will lead to an explosion in potential jobs. It's hard to describe but imagine a software engineer learning how to create a rest api for the first time after doing soap. And then integrating various apis to harness saas products, cloud deployments, etc back in the 2000s.

Then again I also talk to an ex-googler I met on Hacker News who built an LLM app and is now spending most of his time selling his saas product because he can't find a job either. That's a very positive go-getter attitude.