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by kubanczyk 180 days ago
Off the top of my head, possible problems here might be:

1. To handle trees easily you have to understand recursion. Somebody with no CS experience (and no parser experience) might never ever used recursion in anger, even if they launched zillion commercial projects.

2. No Big-O notation. Interviewers usually ask questions about time/space complexity.

And the elephant in the room is that leetcodes are getting trickier and trickier, that's LLM era for you.
2 comments
Delk 180 days ago
I haven't looked at leetcode in a long time but if the problems require e.g. rebalancing a tree, I honestly don't remember how to do it and might not be able to reason it out on the spot either. I have no problems with concepts like recursion or computational complexity though.

It sounds like leetcode problems require either memorization of a significant number of algorithm design patterns or seriously sharp algorithmic problem solving skills.

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lelanthran 180 days ago
> Off the top of my head, possible problems here might be:

> 1. To handle trees easily you have to understand recursion.

Well that's the point of the exercises I suggest - to learn recursion :-/

> No Big-O notation. Interviewers usually ask questions about time/space complexity

Well, that's the other half of the interview, I only promised that my method will cover half the questions :-)

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kubanczyk 180 days ago
> Well that's the point of the exercises I suggest - to learn recursion :-/

Then we must have been talking past each other. We are considering this problem here:

>> I never took affinity to computer science/math, but I love building real world products with software. [...] I am struggling with all the interviews that have these leetcode problems.

Then your advice to these interview problem is to learn some CS - the useful parts of it? E.g. recursion is CS.

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lelanthran 179 days ago
>>>but I love building real world products with software.

> Then your advice to these interview problem is to learn some CS - the useful parts of it?

Theory was not my advice.

My advice was to do practical things with trees; I felt it would fit his love of building real things.

I mean, I didn't recommend doing problems out of a textbook, did I?

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