JobMarket #Leetcode #CodingTests #JobSearch #CareerAdvice
Hey everyone! 👋 Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the job market, especially when you have limited experience and are facing challenges like leetcode-style coding tests? 🤔 Well, you’re not alone!
I recently came across this dilemma and could relate to the struggles shared by many aspiring professionals. With less than 1 year of experience and a 2-year gap, it can be tough to navigate the competitive job market. However, here are some possible solutions that might help you:
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Leverage Your Skills: Highlight your practical experience with Spring Framework, Microservices, Angular, React, Docker, Kubernetes, and other technologies in your resume. Showcase your hands-on projects to demonstrate your capabilities.
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Network and Seek Opportunities: Reach out to industry professionals through platforms like LinkedIn, attend virtual meetups, and seek referrals. Networking can open doors to hidden job opportunities that may not require leetcode-style tests.
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Prepare for Coding Interviews: While leetcode-style coding tests can be daunting, practice and preparation can help you build confidence. Start with basic problems, gradually increase the difficulty level, and seek guidance from online resources and coding challenges.
- Stay Positive and Persistent: Job hunting can be challenging, but don’t lose hope. Stay positive, continue learning, and persevere in your job search. Remember, every rejection is a step closer to your dream job.
So, what do you think? How do you plan to tackle the job market and overcome the challenges ahead? Let’s share our experiences and insights to support each other on this journey! 💪 #CareerGrowth #NeverGiveUp
It’s possible to find positions that don’t have Leetcode-style assessments. My current role did not require DSA for the interview. That being said, now that I am responsible for hiring new engineers, it will certainly be part of our interview process going forward. I know there are lots of people who claim they’ve studied Leetcode extensively and it has never been applicable to their work. I don’t know what these people are working on. It’s important to me that engineers understand the space and time complexity of the solutions they design, and what sorts of strategies work best for different kinds of problems. If they already have a solid understanding of DSA, they’ll be able to solve the kind of questions I ask even without specifically preparing on Leetcode. It demonstrates an ability to think logically while focusing on the important concerns. Not every candidate who does well on DSA questions will make a good engineer, but I believe it increases the likelihood. Regarding your personal difficulty getting started: I’ve never met anyone who was a complete DSA natural. It’s hard for everyone starting out. When you’re able to demonstrate mastery to an interviewer, part of what you’re showing them is that you encountered those initial challenges and had the fortitude to push through and eventually overcome them. That’s attractive.
> I am worried about leetcode-style coding tests/interview which I have never done and always get a feeling that is out of my skill-range
What are you doing to remedy this? This is a solvable problem.
> I feel like it’s my old brain that doesn’t want to learn leetcoding.
If your brain does not want to learn new things, this might not be the right career for you.
< 1 YOE will be tough. Drop an anonymized resume so people can review it. The market is indeed tough right now, but if you’re not getting any callbacks for initial rounds then you should spend as much time on your resume as possible.
View interviewing as a funnel. Top of funnel is getting the first round. If you drop off there then focus on improving your resume/linkedin/networking to get that first round.
Once that lokos good, you can move to the next stage which will usually be the coding screen. Usually it’s Leetcode style, but something on the easy side. If you drop off here then you should prep Leetcode basics (like at least be able to do Hashmap Easy/Medium problems). Knowing the basics is pretty low lift and has high ROI so id recommend at least that
Finally part of the funnel is the onsite loop + optional leadership type meetings. Apply the same logic as before but determine what part of the loop you struggle with (coding, system design, behavioral).
TL;DR – you don’t need to grind LC super hard. Approach interviewing as a funnel, and if you drop off at a stage frequently then address it there. Sometimes that might be doing *some* leetcoding, but most non big-tech companies will have pretty reasonable coding screens (i.e. not that LC intensive, but might require basics).
Keep applying and keep studying leetcode. It’s a down market so it’s going to take a lot more applications and a lot more time than expected. Do not spend a year mastering leetcode without applying to jobs at the same time — you’ll waste a lot of time.
> I was able to build a 5-node Kubernetes Cluster to learn Kubernetes and practice my coding skills, setup Jenkins pipeline to automate my builds. And have been coding a small web-based project to enhance my skills in developing enterprise-style microservices. I feel like I have learned a lot during these two years and have included what I know in the resume.
Without demonstrated job experience this kind of stuff is really fluff and depending on the role it’s the kind of thing people may not like seeing.
If you’re applying to junior positions as someone with 1 year of experience then this kind of stuff may be relevant in demonstrating your eagerness to learn. Also, you’re talking about front-end, back-end and infrastructure all in the same resume, but only with 1 year of experience. Are you marketing yourself as a “full stack” web developer? Because if not then it seems like you’re not really going to be competent at any of these things. You might remedy this by creating a portfolio of your work that demonstrates the skills you have.
The problem you have with the two year gap is the only one year of experience. You would need to get your resume in front of a hiring manager that wasn’t some agist ass who immediately views your history as an indication that you don’t have what it takes. So many junior web dev roles just want to grind you in to the dust for peanuts.
>I am 36 years old and completed my degree in 2021 and sometimes I feel like it’s my old brain that doesn’t want to learn leetcoding.
Nobody does, and the reality is that anything other than the most basic intro puzzles on sites like leetcode are completely irrelevant to job seeking. In an interview setting leetcode style questions are just a framework to show you understand basics of using a language, and also that you have an idea of what the code does and how you might change it to behave differently. No one expects you to have a bunch of regular expression trivia memorized so that you can solve a specific problem without using `if` statements. They certainly do expect you to understand, for example, that having polymorphic arguments to a javascript function will incur a performance penalty and thus you should not do that inside loops. If you write code to solve a problem you should have some understanding of what you’re writing, which a lot of folks who memorize leetcode answers to prep for interviews do not.