[HN Gopher] What I Learned Preparing LeetCode for Amazon
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What I Learned Preparing LeetCode for Amazon
Author : arihantparsoya
Score : 7 points
Date : 2024-09-14 14:08 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcareergrowth.beehiiv.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcareergrowth.beehiiv.com)
| Jtsummers wrote:
| This is an editorialized title, the actual title is "Mastering
| Leetcode: Comprehensive Guide to Prepare for Leetcode Interviews"
| and the whole thing is an advertisement to hire them for tutoring
| (at the end of the "article", really an advert).
|
| Regarding the contents of the advertisement, for those who bother
| with leetcode, why? I've tried random easy, medium, and hard
| problems. They're either silly (why would they even be asking
| those questions? and phrased so awkwardly) or mostly things any
| recent grad can solve in 10-60 minutes if they spend some time
| thinking about it. And for professionals, I'd expect it to be
| similar unless you haven't had to do any algorithmic thinking for
| years.
|
| Many of the problems end up having a "trick" that greatly
| simplifies it once you spend 1-5 minutes thinking. I just pulled
| it back up and a random medium problem took me under 5 minutes.
| The "trick" was that most of the problem statement can be
| discarded because it's superfluous, that took me about a minute
| to realize. Then I wrote up a solution in about a minute and
| missed an edge case, took me a couple minutes to figure out what
| I'd missed and finally have a correct submission.
|
| And that's coming in cold, if I were expecting to solve leetcode
| problems today I probably wouldn't have missed that (common to a
| lot of the problems) edge case.
|
| For hiring organizations, you'll learn nothing about me from this
| except that I've not forgotten my high school CS class from the
| 1990s, and definitely wouldn't tell you anything about what I
| learned in college or as a professional since then. And that high
| school was nothing special with STEM. It was just a random public
| high school in Nevada focused on arts and languages, not STEM at
| all. The STEM courses were mostly average, maybe slightly above
| compared to the area, but we did not compete well with schools
| that actually focused on STEM.
|
| EDIT: The hard problems do draw from things I learned in college,
| and not HS. But I've yet to see an easy one that HS me could not
| have solved with some modest effort or a medium one that would
| take more than what I learned in HS and my first year of college.
|
| ------
|
| Further EDIT: Regarding the title, the submitter put this up a
| day ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41530482) and got
| no traction. So they tried again with the editorialized title.
| Still not much traction.
| tastyminerals2 wrote:
| I tried doing some LeetCode problems and found that the time I
| spent making sense of their task descriptions is just not worth
| it. They are a mixed bag and some of them are simply not well
| written to a degree that you feel stupid while spending hours to
| make your code pass their tests. Is it some elaborate scheme to
| make you pay and use the debugger? In the end I simply didn't
| enjoy the process.
|
| What I really liked going through though are project euler and
| 4ever-clojure problems. It's subjective but I suspect it's
| because you don't need to read through paragraphs of text before
| starting to write a solution. It's the opposite, the small
| problems with clear goals leave you with more space for
| creativity and urge you to write more code in the end. I
| personally found the hours spent on such problems to be more
| productive.
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