[deanrtaylor]

Isn't the general mantra around leetcode that you should be spending a few hours after work in the lead up to joining the interview process to get into the swing of it?

What would be different from spending that time making a few PRs to an open source project or just building something from scratch to demonstrate your skills?

A lot of engineers that I've worked with have never spent time on leetcode and struggle to answer the common interview questions that aren't easy or low medium, so personally I don't see it as that much different, there's time required either way. One is productive, one isn't.

[kjkjadksj]

No other fields work like that. Computer science hiring managers need to figure it out. You have engineers in other fields who have long careers working multiple companies not even allowed to talk about what even occurred and its just routine.

[wakawaka28]

Actually they do work like that. Engineers can be asked to solve problems in interviews. But the pressure doesn't seem like in software, where many people complain. There's no LeetCode equivalent for other kinds of engineering I think. But some of them do have licensing to deal with.

[ric2b]

Those engineering fields have exams and certifications. Software Engineering is still too immature for that, I think.

[kjkjadksj]

Ok. Replace engineering with just a business executive bound by NDA or security clearance into silence and my point still stands: no leetcode, no tests, no certifications, no gods, and people have long winded highly compensated careers and the sky doesn’t fall.

[BeFlatXIII]

Software engineering is too easily self-taught for certifications to become the norm. The moment you have a cohort of people with demonstrable skills without such certifications, the value of the cert is undermined.

[Amezarak]

> What would be different from spending that time making a few PRs to an open source project or just building something from scratch to demonstrate your sk

The fact my employer specifically forbids me from doing so.