#LeetCode #CareerDevelopment #WorkLifeBalance
Hey everyone! 👋 Is it really stupid not to be studying leetcode? 🤔
I’m in a job that I enjoy, but it’s pretty demanding and leaves me exhausted by the end of the week. I’ve been hesitant to study leetcode on the weekends because I’m worried about burning out fast. Plus, I’m not currently aiming to work at big tech companies like FAANG (though that could change in the future).
Here are my thoughts:
– I like leetcode, even though I’m not the best at it.
– I just want to take some time to enjoy life outside of work.
– Am I missing out on opportunities by not focusing on leetcode?
Do you think there is a middle ground where I can balance career development with personal time? What are your thoughts on this dilemma? Let’s discuss and share insights! 🌟
Possible Solution:
– Consider setting aside a specific time each week to practice leetcode, so you maintain a healthy work-life balance.
– Explore other ways to enhance your skills and professional growth that align with your current career goals.
If you like doing it then just do it. As a bonus you’ll learn some things.
Now, if you’re trying to learn to program seriously, I would not recommend leetcode. You need reading material and projects that are more than just data structures and algorithms.
I have never used leetcode or a similar service, have no interest in FAANG/big tech, and I’m doing just fine.
What would you be doing it for? Hoping to hone skills to jump to another company or do you just feel the pressure to do it from other people in the industry?
Don’t do leetcode if
– you cannot get fired
– don’t plan to jump ship
Do leetcode if
– you want to be prepared for layoff
– want higher comp
Many companies ask leetcode though. Also, most people’s leetcoding ability drops to 30- 50% during the actual interviews due to stress and random nature of interviews.
Kind of. If you want to make more money for about the same amount of work, Leetcode has a greater return on investment than any other task you can do.
There is something called the theory of constraints. It states that any system grows to its weakest link and nothing more.
Right now, leetcode is likely your constraint. You could potentially double to triple your income by studying leetcode for three months. If I phrase it like that, yeah it sounds pretty stupid to not study it.
However, even though the amount of work is around the same, Big Tech can be more stressful than other companies due to the politics and the scope of your responsibility being large. If you think that extra stress is not worth triple your wage, then leetcode isn’t worth it. That’s the cost equation.
I’ve never used leetcode and it’s never been a problem. I don’t work for super-selective employers and I don’t live/work in the Bay area.
>Correct me if I’m wrong, but I assume leetcode is mostly for big tech.
You are wrong.
Non-tech F500’s have leetcode-style questions, small companies / startups have leetcode-style questions. You can’t really make generalizations about company’s interview processes. Some will ask leetcode-style questions, some won’t.
If you plan to turn down every leetcode-style interview, you’re going to be in for a tough time. Not because those kinds of companies don’t exist, but rather because they don’t *advertise it*. You won’t know what the interview will be like until you’re interviewing, so without knowing it you’ll be applying to tons of companies that use leetcode.
That being said, what motivated you to ask this question? Are you asking if you should be studying leetcode *constantly*? The only time when you need to be preparing with leetcode is when you’re actively job searching.
People don’t generally study leetcode when they’re not planning to job hop. Can you imagine how miserable it’d be to grind leetcode for a 20 year long career? That’s thousand and thousands of hours of your life, wasted.
Leetcode is like riding a bike. We don’t completely forget how to do it while we’re not studying it. When we need it for job hunting, we dust off the cobwebs over maybe a week or two, and we’re back where we were before.
Well I leetcode but i can’t get interviews in the first place, so i suppose in this case it’s stupid *to* study leetcode
No, I never touched it my life and companies you’ve heard of hired me. The “medium leetcode” hustle is for FAANG/MANGA and people who spout advice they don’t understand. I don’t code my free time. I got better things to do.
I pass coding examples. They’re pass/fail. They’re most realistic things you do on the job like string and array manipulation and forming a map to track occurrences. Normal companies aren’t going to ask you to do recursion or an n log n sorting algorithm on the spot. In real life you use an API.
Sorry, I forgot: **Most people have no idea what leetcode even is, as in, 4 out of 5 developers on my team. I didn’t know until I came here.**
It depends. If you’re asking “Should I spend 500 hours grinding leetcode, or should I spend 500 hours doing a side project?”, there’s an argument to be made that the side project is a better investment of your time.
Leetcode is mostly only useful for interview practice. While it does have some indirect benefits, a side project can be more educational.
What is even more stupid is doing leetcode and still getting no job/laid off. This whole field is a joke.
I love how interviews are completely unrelated to real everyday work and skills and everyone knows it and everyone is still doing this shenanigans.
Some startups ask leetcode style questions and so do some regular companies. Do you have to leet code? Absolutely not because tons of places hire using projects, whiteboards, the asshole test…FWIW even with the flood of people due to layoffs some companies are still having trouble finding the workers they need. For the average company, they need a person who can produce from week-month 1 more than they need someone who can invert a binary tree or solve the knapsack problem
I’ve poked at some of the various code prep style sites just to see the kinds of questions they asked and see if I was familiar with how to solve them against their benchmark times. What I found was that about 10% of the questions I answered were actually challenging in the sense that their test cases included edge cases I either didn’t consider or weren’t sufficiently described in the question. The other 90% just covered the basic language features they were demonstrating with the question.
Invariably I would get to a stage, maybe 20 questions in, where it all of a sudden became regex trivia where you were asked to solve a problem but weren’t allowed, for example, to use any `if` statements. This stuff was useless.
What I do enjoy is Advent of Code that happens every year in December. I feel like doing at least the first couple weeks of that event keeps me “in shape” when it comes to the sorts of interview code tasks that actually check your output rather than just looking over somethign you write on a white board.
Don’t do leetcode, plenty of jobs out there that actually measure your skills during interviewing without the need to waste hours practicing.
Honestly, unless you’re a fake and know nothing, you can get up to speed with leetcode in a month (medium). It’s not something to think about unless you’re about to jump ship
I prefer code advent, it has a storyline progress with each problem/puzzle you solve, and it’s more rewarding to see your self unlocking those Stars and comparing yourself with other on the lead board. LeetCode is just boring to me.
Yes
Leetcode is absolutely not just for “big tech”. I’ve interviewed at FAANG companies, medium sized companies, small startups, etc.. I’ve never had an interview that didn’t have a technical portion and you can find every one of those questions on leetcode.
You don’t have to grind questions on leetcode every day unless you’re deep into applying right now. But doing a question a day before you leave for work or something just to keep yourself sharp isn’t a bad idea.
Only study it when ur about to interview
I just do the leetcode daily problem each morning. If I don’t have something worked out within 10-15 minutes, I consult the editorial or other solutions.
When I landed an interview, I set it for about a week out and grinded neetcode, 5-10 problems a day with the same strategy. By the end I was able to solve most of the problems quickly except DP. Interview questions ended up being stupid easy.
You like your work and what you are doing. Why do you think something else will be better or “less work”? It’s called “work” for a reason.