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Agreed. If you hire a leetcoder, you get a leetcoder. Sometimes I wonder if you just end up hiring someone who will spend over half their time on the job grin

Agreed. If you hire a leetcoder, you get a leetcoder. Sometimes I wonder if you just end up hiring someone who will spend over half their time on the job grinding away at LC, rather than doing the boring, mundane day-to-day work. You would almost have to make LC a job in itself to make it through the next LC interview... It does get the LC website and the CTCI people paid, though.

decafninja 4y ago
There literally are “professional leetcoders”. I was one of them, and I know other friends/colleagues who were/are too. Consider a dull boring low paying cost center job at a non-tech company that leaves you a lot of free time. You can either use that free time to go above and beyond your call of duty and chase promotions and fancy titles, albeit with trivial pay raises. Or you can practice leetcode at work to move to a better company where the work is more interesting and the pay significantly better. Most of my colleagues who entered my previous company around the same time as me chose the first path and got one or more promotions to Vice President or Director, etc. (this is a bank). They received trivial raises. I chose to leetcode instead, got zero promotions (though still a lot of praise at doing my job). Then I used my leetcode skills - which were completely divorced from my day to day SWE work, to jump ship and nearly quadruple my TC. FWIW, my current work is also completely divorced from leetcode. I probably make significantly more than my former department head now, as a “mere” untitled senior SWE.
- codalan 4y ago
  Yeah, been thinking of getting back into it again, mostly out of boredom. But I also view it as an inane and stupid task. It seems like this industry values leetcode over interviewing for breadth and depth of subject matter. We don't do this to doctors and lawyers, or most other professions.
  - decafninja 4y ago
    It’s stupid I agree. But that’s the current meta of the game, and no one of any influence seems to want to change it. You could say homework is becoming an alternative, but that is egregious for its own reasons, and is more often in addition to leetcode, not instead of. Homework also does not scale - at least leetcode skills scale horizontally across many different companies’ interviews. The irony is that solving leetcode is actually fun - if it wasn’t associated with the pressure and burden of deciding the fate of a potentially career and life changing interview.

decafninja 4y ago

There literally are “professional leetcoders”. I was one of them, and I know other friends/colleagues who were/are too. Consider a dull boring low paying cost center job at a non-tech company that leaves you a lot of free time. You can either use that free time to go above and beyond your call of duty and chase promotions and fancy titles, albeit with trivial pay raises. Or you can practice leetcode at work to move to a better company where the work is more interesting and the pay significantly better. Most of my colleagues who entered my previous company around the same time as me chose the first path and got one or more promotions to Vice President or Director, etc. (this is a bank). They received trivial raises. I chose to leetcode instead, got zero promotions (though still a lot of praise at doing my job). Then I used my leetcode skills - which were completely divorced from my day to day SWE work, to jump ship and nearly quadruple my TC. FWIW, my current work is also completely divorced from leetcode. I probably make significantly more than my former department head now, as a “mere” untitled senior SWE.

codalan 4y ago
Yeah, been thinking of getting back into it again, mostly out of boredom. But I also view it as an inane and stupid task. It seems like this industry values leetcode over interviewing for breadth and depth of subject matter. We don't do this to doctors and lawyers, or most other professions.
- decafninja 4y ago
  It’s stupid I agree. But that’s the current meta of the game, and no one of any influence seems to want to change it. You could say homework is becoming an alternative, but that is egregious for its own reasons, and is more often in addition to leetcode, not instead of. Homework also does not scale - at least leetcode skills scale horizontally across many different companies’ interviews. The irony is that solving leetcode is actually fun - if it wasn’t associated with the pressure and burden of deciding the fate of a potentially career and life changing interview.