LeetCode: The Worst Thing to Happen to Software Engineering 

Real life analogy of a live coding interview: "Here's a problem, I'm gonna stand here and watch you solve it in a couple of minutes, but no stress, if you don't make it fast enough, you get fired."

I agree with you on this. 99% of my job as a software engineer involves simple code. If I come across a problem that requires some algorithm that I don't remember, I can research it when I need it.

Every company I worked for that required leetcode problems, turned out to be toxic in some way. Every company that I worked for that didn't and instead asked questions relevant to the role, ended up being much better places to work. Just my own personal experience.

Another HUGE problem is non-FANG companies starting to use leetcode for their interviews because they want to copy these massive FANG companies and be perceived as them. All this does is make it harder for people to actually get a job. Imagine you have to do hard leetcode just to get hired at a small company. This just destroys the industry.

This is fundamentally not a problem with leetcode. If it wasn't leetcode, it would have been something else. The problem is interviewers are trying to do their job with the least amount of effort.

I do embedded systems. I write C code to control real world inputs/outputs. In 25 years, I've NEVER had to do anything with searching or strings; but that's what all the interviewers ask about.

The really annoying thing is that a lot of the jobs that require leetcode interview problems DONT EVEN REQUIRE THAT LEVEL/STYLE OF PROGRAMMING. If you're hiring for a front end developer position, you aren't writing these complex algos. Guarantee someone has already written a module that works 'good enough' to solve your problem faster than it would take you to sit down and write out your own. Not only that but they skip critical skills actually necessary to do the job in favor of leetcode garbage. I had team members who passed leetcode interviews but didn't know CSS for a front end developer position!!

Great video! In 27 years of programming, I've never once been presented with a customer problem that required a software solution within a few minutes or a few lines of code, or that *could* be solved without first spending many, many days understanding the nuances of the problem. The real test of a programmer is seeing how familiar they are with consuming and outputting CSV 😝

When I was in college these were called programming puzzles or programming contest problems. They're like daily brain stretching exercises. No one ever thought of them as job tests because you almost never run into a need to write this kind of stuff. And you wouldn't actually want to inflict some tight recursive backtracking function on the codebase or your colleagues. If you're using it as a test you're probably just looking for gatekeeping techniques to find people who like the same kind of puzzles you do or went to the same school. Not looking for software developers.

I'm old enough to remember when software development was fun. What happened?!?

As a Full-Stack software dev working for small/medium companies I found that learning stuff like software architecture and coding patterns was much more beneficial than learning algorithms and data structures for these are mostly already applied on the frameworks and its internal methods that I use. Technical interviews for small/medium companies that require leet code type deep knowledge are definitely not realistic.

The problem is not LeetCode. The problem is that there are a lot of people responsible for interviewing who simply don't have the skills to do so. They see 'Outsourcing' the responsibility of interviewing to LeetCode as a lazy way out but it is abrogating their responsibilities and putting organisations at considerable risk. Whenever I interview people, I structure questions in ways that will very quickly reveal whether a candidate knows their stuff or not and to what depth. Any competent interviewer should be able to do this. If they can't, the management of an organisation shouldn't be risking the future of their organisation by exposing these people to interviewees.

Strong correlation between Leetcode interview questions and Toxic workplace environment.

Grinding leetcode is like learning scales on the piano in order to join an industry where you're supposed to write symphonies like Beethoven, given time. When you're in the engineering environment, it doesn't work like that day to day... ever... not even in FANG... (trust me on this, I work there). I've also worked with incredibly competent engineers who, when made redundant, were asked leetcode style questions by small companies who 'think they're Google'. He didn't get the job, confidence so utterly destroyed that he thought he should change industry. On the other hand, the best interview for engineering I ever had was surrounded with questions like: "You live in a country which drives on the left. The government put you in charge of a new initiative to change the traffic system so everyone drives on the right. So... how would you go about it?". You start proposing logistical solutions and in collaboration with the interviewer, you go down the rabbit hole probing the weaknesses with your idea and you collaboratively change the plan and correct your thinking as the interviewer finds holes in your solutions. It's not about 'correctness'. It's about mental agility and can you think flexibly and creatively. You can't study for this, and basically the intake of candidates was from people of all walks of life - not just Comp Sci. I got the job and worked with amazing people who were trained in astrophysics, art and textile design. They still work in the industry, some of the best engineers I ever worked with. While anyone can be a trained monkey, I prefer to work with creative intelligent people and this was (as intimidating as it was) the BEST interview process I have ever come across. The company by the way is a household name and extremely successful in the UK to this very day.

Testing algorithms and data structures in job interview for a senior dev... Yeah, it's still happening. In my career (15 y) I've had to use typical algorithmic approach maybe a couple of times. The most difficult part is not even memorizing how e.g. streams work in Java or how particular framework works. Most difficult thing in software dev is to read code which is already written and expanding it. Second hardest thing is to resolve bugs of external frameworks and libraries and address exceptional cases.

We chose to use a code review for our interview process. We give the candidate a hypothetical ticket and the PR that was submitted against it and ask them to go to town with the red pen. The PR itself is a grab bag of errors we see people commonly making. We chuck in errors in coding style, forget to add unit tests, reimplement a standard library feature because the engineer didn’t consult the docco, nest if/else, basic SQL errors that would deliver a subtly incorrect result, pointless over abstraction, total lack of abstraction, use of inefficient pattern at an architectural level, use of spaghetti algo to solve some real life data requirement, etc The most important thing I look for is the tone of the candidates responses. In our teams view of the world, PR’s should be treated like pair coding and a spirit of collaboration is required. One word feedback like “No.” or know-it-alls who take pointless “I’ll die on this hill” positions over trivial or subjective code are the reason PR’s can spend a eternity in review, killing you velocity. Conversely we get people who are awesome at writing greenfield code but lack ability around reading other people’s code, and they are the reason teams, despite requiring two lgtm’s and a trip through QA, still manage to push trivial bugs. This kind of process isn’t going to work for a lot of teams given their processes and structure, but for us we have found it gives us the most accurate real world idea of what that person is going to be like when we dump them in the jockeys saddle.

I think leetcode is misused by interviewers who themself don't know much about coding. When I was involved in the hiring process in my previous company we asked a candidate to bring a project they have worked on (privately) and present it to us. We then did a little live code review and asked based on that project how the candidate would implemented a change that comes out throughout the presentation and review. You learn much more about the person and if it is not their own code you will be able to tell. But such an interview process requires experienced coders taking part in the interview as well.

Thank you for this. I was caught up in the game industry layoffs at the beginning of the year and EVERY SINGLE interview used leetcode or something similar. I've been a software engineer for around 20 years now and cant tell you the last time i hand-coded quick sort or a red-black tree... but those were the types of questions asked. Never mind that a candidate has worked in multiple languages across multiple industries... "if they cant code a quick sort in 15 minutes, we dont want them". I've been on the hiring side in the past and I think the combination of leetcode questions on timed, web based, non-interactive tests are completely worthless for anyone with experience. I'd much rather a candidate walk me through a problem they solved in the past and we have a conversation where they explain the problem, solution, why they chose the solution, how they discovered the solution, etc. But that takes time and hiring managers who also have a clue.... which seems to be more and more rare.

I can pretty much code anything thrown my way but fail miserably at leetcode interviews. My mind overthinks thing, I panic, and I fail. I also noticed that at places I worked that implemented leetcode it gave us people who could answer tricky questions but couldn’t code their way out of a paper bag and would miss such obvious things an experience dev would get. Do interviewers want someone who can write scalable enterprise software or answer tricky questions?

These problems are perfect for ChatGPT. You don’t need a software engineer for them.

Interviews generally are terrible. Had one recently ask me in the context of structuring a website, "what would that look like?". Realised after the interview he meant what would it look like in an architectural or project organization way, ...I think. But as this was right off the back of discussing UIs, I talked about he actual GUI. This seems to happen a lot, people have a "I know what I mean" question, but forget that I can't read their thoughts, so they need to be explicit in asking the question clearly. And follow up and clarify instead of just going silent and being like "oh they didn't answer correctly".

Interviewers seem to not care that these problems are kinda based on CS Data Structures & Algorithms and lots of SWE's don't have formal qualifications, yet the interviewers wants you code like a CS dev when it's not required IRL.

While I agree that memorizing solutions of LeetCode to pass an interview is bad in ways mentioned in the video, understanding COMMON APPROACHES to write a solution that is memory and space efficient can save so much cost especially using cloud services that base total cost depending on how LONG your code takes to run and how much memory it needs. (reduces the need for scaling vertically or horizontally.) simply, memorizing is NOT the objective you should aim for when learning LeetCode, rather understanding the idea on how to forge an efficient code should be.

Leetcode is not bad practise, overuse of it is and ignoring others aspects of Software Engineering is.

In my opinion, Leetcode should be used for only 1 thing. Learning how to code more effectively. It should be used as training exercises only. Not as an indication of how good someone is at a job that has nothing to with algorithmic programming.

Coding exercises are generally a waste of time because you can make/contribute to functioning projects instead. Leetcode questions teach you next to nothing about broader project structure and working with other people's code.

I had interview where instead of LeetCode they gave me frameworks that I had never seen before and asked me to code some features to some dummy 100-200 lines long web app they've created. And what they wanted to see was who well I can read the documentation of framework that I have not seen before and how well I can figure things out - they didn't even care that I finish the solution within given time limit. Since I am not a math person I was fine with it because math questions to me would mean that I could only pass them within time limit if I have memorized it before. But with frameworks if you have general understanding, you will get a ton of hints from autocomplete alone so it's much easier for me and much better for company because my real job wasnt to code algorithms.

TLDR: Leetcode in itself is a haven of learning software engineering. If you enjoy leetcoding to a certain degree, you're on the right path. Grinding the hell out of Leetcode while not enjoying it at all just because these fucking corporates set their shitty interviews that way is the real problem. I myself was benefitted immensely after spending hours on Leetcode, because I like doing it and learnt a whole lot of new concepts along the way. My programming skills certainly skyrocketed and so did my problem solving skills. It also makes you think more low-level about creating your subroutines for a given problem.

Excellent! With decades of experience, I rarely had to implement data structure algorithms. The biggest problems were understanding the stakeholders, managing expectations, solving the lack of documentation on systems, and other non-coding tasks. You nailed it. It’s the thinking that matters. Everything in engineering is dependent on managing constraints

It does seem rather pointless using LeetCode because many problems need to be thought out and not just coding a solution from memory! They need to use a real-world problem and give the candidate a test to see if they can problem-solve the answer using reason. This would be a better determination of their coding ability!

Software engineers from all countries - unite! in order to change the rules of the game and keep the high salaries

Love your commentaries. And am glad you didn't edit out that thing near the beginning. Retired / burned out software eng here. I never had to do much with Leetcode, it was mostly after my time. Though I am giving some of these LeetCode questions to one of my students. I think he needs to know what he is going to face.

In Leetcode training, there's an elephant in the room: a perfect Leetcode interview candidate is a chatbot that scanned all the Leetcode canned answers as its training data set. Faster, less expensive than a biological programmer, doesn't complain, doesn't ask for a raise, no unemployment insurance, etc.. This means clever, productive, ingenious programmers will be replaced by Leetcode-trained people. Then the latter will be replaced by AI.

I’m subscribing to your channel because you don’t hold back, wonderful to hear your perspective. Keep it up!

IMO, leetCode is great for getting practice questions and storing up on strategies to efficiently solve unnatural problems using data structures and a few algorithms. The issue with the industry is the interviewers. Now it's no secret that you need some math skill to be able to solve some problems efficiently while building software, heck you might need it with something as trivial as a clip-path in CSS, however for sometime now the number of math Olympiad style questions masqueraded as DSA (data structures and algorithms) problems has increased greatly on the platform and interviewers might pick that because it has a low acceptance rate or it just seems too hard for a junior engineer to pass. That's where I draw the line. If a question isn't relying solely on data structures and algorithms knowledge to solve it, and might require some specific math knowledge (for example combinatorics), then in my opinion, it's a screening interview where only the math-heads get through unfortunately.

I have worked with people who solve everything in the LeetCode style and it is horrible, they end up with complicated and untestable code even for the easiest problems.

The company I work for found that there’s a correlation between how well someone answer DSA questions and how well someone answers system design. Might just be because they’re probably interview prepped more but we hope that DSA knowledge bleeds into system design, which kinda makes sense when choosing the right database for the problem.

So glad I'm at the end of my programming career rather than at the start! No way I'd get a job today. Back in the day when I was interviewing programmers for a job, we got tired of getting programmers who only knew how to code in theory but had really not put in the time at the computer (i.e. could hardly use the keyboard). In the end I started giving a typing test so we could see if we were getting BSed! :) I guess things have escalated from there!

I just enjoy the puzzles and making them performant after; but it is a tiny amount of time during my week

Most refreshing RU-vid video I have seen in such a long time. Keep making these kind of video'sDee

Right now, I think the software job market needs to strike a balance. It seems DSA is more of an excuse to reduce the number of applicants or some form of hazing ritual. If an applicant is tested for basic DSA and then moves on to the core of the job requirement, it will be a more balanced process.

I've been a developer for 20 years, and I've never had a situation where I only have 10 minutes to devise a solution to a problem. This style of interviewing is certainly horrible. Great video!

As someone who has recently started learning web development and is enioying it, it was very disheartening to get to data structures and end up really struggling with things like algorithms, leetcode problems and big o notation etc. I just want to make websites in react and stuff like that makes me feel like i can't be a web dev.

Leetcode is practice, it's not something you want to memorize

I like leetcode for challenges against friends, but agree that it isn't a great interview tool

Back in the 1990's I had one very cool hiring test. It started with abstract symbols, then it got more and complex basically building a programming language. It was a test to see if you as a developer could learn new things fast you never saw before.

Thank you so much for the advice, I do struggle with Leet codes and finds it not as helpful as it seems in real life experience.

Love your channel ❤ You speak the truth!

I've been a software developer/engineer for close to 20 years and now I am currently in a FAANG company and I can tell you that such trivia questions are rarely what you will be doing on a day to day basis. The more important skill is the problem solving. You know.. The VERY THING Leet code is trying to determine. Being able to collaborate, think and talk through problems is way more important. Efficiently writing and communicating ideas is also a really useful skill. That said, doing leet code to build your Datastructures and Algorithms knowledge is definitely helpful. But we are way past that point with the current Leet Code culture between companies and interviewees

Completely agree with your assessment. Being able to identify when an algorithm is required, what data is needed, and how the feature integrates into the larger application is far more important. You can search or just use pre-built implementations (that are already proven and tested) of most algorithms. You can't do the same for application/solution design.

Gold Star for this ! Thanks.

the problem isn't just leetcode. at my company we use IKM. the problem with IKM is that it tests for an extremely specific skillset, when the job requires multiple skillsets. so we always overtest and always undertest because the company refuses to administer (read: pay for) the multiple required tests. got so bad for my time i just say ok, 30 minute interview and a thorough check of your CV and i'll take the risk. for the most junior only. for the more senior i do a vague take-home test. the idea is i don't have to tell you to use SOLID and Clean architecture if you're really a senior, it's really how you fill in the technical blanks...

LeetCode monkey dance is like playing fast rounds of chess for spinal surgeon interview. It's good if you win most of them in general, but why not test skills that will be actually used during spinal surgery.

As a Product Leader who has not written code for over a decade - you are so right. As a hiring manager who has hired over 100 people over the years - you are so right. A good software engineer always asks clarifying questions on edge cases and failure modes. After all, with big data even a small percentage of edge cases, is still a lot of edge cases…

God I had to find a new job last year and I hated these stupid automated tests. None of this stuff has anything to do with actual software engineering job duties, or actual problem solving skills. It’s just a “how well do you remember your computer science 102 midterm?” test. Eventually I did so many practice problems that the ones in interviews were ones I had already seen before so I could solve them within minutes.

Are you saying that people who don't know how to use a for loop learn enough loops by heart to pass an interview but not enough to actually solve problems and explain why they do things the way they do?

Imagine being able to solve 1000 Leetcode problems just to not being able to center a div.

Thanks for the video ❤

Thank you for your video. I agree with you that lots can be hidden behind an interview that’s based on Leetcode. But apart from real world experience, what alternative to Leetcode can you find to actually help candidates prepare for software engineering jobs?

I love to see this kind of video. Coding interviews are a real issue with this industry.I've been doing various kinds of software development for more than 20 years and about 10 years ago I decided I was never going to write code during a formal interview again. I'm happy to broadly discuss various strategies for solving problems (heck I would do that for hours if they let me) and describe how I might break down any given problem into smaller, more solvable chunks, but I wont write code. If they want to see code I always suggest that they pair me with one of their developers for a few hours. That way I'm solving real problems, not "interview" problems, and the developer I'm paired with will get to see if I know what I'm talking about and how well I work collaboratively with another developer. And yes, this means I've had some very short interviews with some companies since the interviewer (often not a developer at all) doesn't know how to proceed if I wont write code on the spot. But I've still been very successful and I think handling interviews this way has helped me to find projects and jobs that I enjoy far more than I would have otherwise.

I've been in software engineering for decades. I'd never heard of leetcode, lol. I've interviewed hundreds of times. And the way you describe problem solving irl is how I see it. It's usually a set of trade offs. Not a very specific graph theory problem with a single very specific solution.

Never used leat code. Self taught myself code and just landed a job 💪🏻

Your vids always had an honest air about them. I feel like I was waiting for someone to post something like this. Liked and finally subscribed! I wasn't understanding why Leet code was so pushed as of recently. Especially when companies now are in more demand for employing fresh IT blood than ever. I mean, "Oh the industry is in a severe need. So lets make it harder for them to get in the damn door!", is what its starting to look like now.... Not exactly gate keeping (overused term). But it is something counter-effective. And it's stupid weird. I've had fun and trouble with the languages I've so far learned. But the courses I took to learn them all taught me problem solving and product generating measures. You know, the actual shit that is on a job?

Saw the video on agile and now this one. Subbed.

This is refreshing. Some exercises such as 2some is well worth learning.

How does adding numbers backwards work? Do you expect a different answer as opposed to just adding the two numbers?

good video. i have one question tho. what would the alternative be? im in uni rn to become a software engineer, and i thought leetcode would be pretty useful. what would be the alternative then in order to become a better software engineer?

Thank you for this video. I've had a grudge with this type of interview since before leetcode (hackerrank, codillity...) It absolutely doesn't prove that the candidate is good or knows how to code, it's just lazy interviewing (especially when it's 100% automated). In most cases, it just proves that the candidate has already solved it before. I passed in two interviews that used this in the past. For one of them I barely passed and for the other one I passed with flying colors because I studied for it and knew the solution for the most complicated of the three problems that I had to resolve in 90 min (which was an extremely specific solution).

One thing I like about leetcode is you can see other people's solutions, analyze them and discover some new tricks which might make your code look nicer or work better. They're sorted by performance and it can really help to adopt better practices in my opinion. But of course grinding and memorizing solutions it's something opposite of programming. I didn't even know it was a thing.

We are a startup and we also do Coding challenge. But it's a full stack project of the candidate's choice of problem statement and technology for 3 days. This gives us a holistic view of their critical thinking, design thinking and also skills. And then we ask them to explain it by scanning the code and propose scenarios e.g. best data structures for improving a given logic or best infrastructure architecture that would work for a given question or if the technology used moves from SQL to Nosql etc. It keeps them grounded and forces them to learn the code even if they had to do a blind copy paste

When I interviewed for big tech, the recruiters told me to read Programming Interviews Exposed, where it explains that talking about the thinking process and asking the right questions is important. I also was a Google employee and we didn't use Leetcode problems to interview people, we were actively told to choose problems that were not in that kind of websites. Overall I am happy that someone finally talks about this issue, I'm planning to talk about that as well.

As a fullstack engineer at a fortune 500 company, I can confidently say that my day to day work pretty much NEVER involves writing algorithms or solving Leetcode-style problems. My experience has been much more geared towards interfacing with APIs, processing real-world data, and managing deployments in complex microservice ecosystems. Leetcode doesn't do a good job of teaching programmers practical skills, in my opinion.

I have spent hundreds of hours on projects and zero hours on leetcode. Would it be a good idea to spend some amount of time on LeetCode? (I am still in high school)

When I saw this video I was initially very skeptical. However, as a software developer of 30 years I agree with everything you say here. It seems you are giving out genuinely relevant advice and not just looking for clicks/views like some other RU-vid "developers"

Leetcode is only for interviews it's not the actual job. Need to start looking at how to interview people for the job.

As a cybersecurity engineer (with some software dev background) who sits in on interviews as a technical interviewer, I spend time looking at someone's resume and asking questions to validate their knowledge as well. If someone manages to get to an interview and that don't exactly meet the requirements we find out if they are a team fit and ask abstract questions to see if they could fit the role. A key question I always ask in some way or another is "if you didn't know the answer what would you do?" and I'm literally just wanting them to tell me they Google it. I'm not an expert interviewer but I've not been disappointed by the several candidates I've given a thumbs up for. To get quality hires, you need quality interviewers, which requires a pool of existing quality talent who don't have an ego so large they need to flex hardcore unrealistic problems on candidates. I've certainly asked challenging questions - I've been surprised to get right answers but I'm more asking to see how they handle a problem.

Swe in the past are master of DSA because that’s how they optimized our computers to work under constraints. From making an OS, designing underlying architecture like cache, instructions scheduling. Now we only have to solve a couple of puzzle problems and we are complaining?

The worst part is people just copy-pasting the solution

what about not yet software engineers? is it a good thing to level up some basic skills?

TLDR: leetcode is for other smarter people out there, who can generalize rather than memorize a solution

My typical workday contains three questions: 1) What's actually is our problem? 2) Can we fix it? 3) Should we fix it? Fixing anything has often a ton of side effects that you need to consider. So you need to communicate A LOT with stakeholders. Question and Answer riddles like these are unrealistic, because in reality you don't even have the question.

I assume that most software engineers will have a related college degree in CS, CE, etc. Won't they have already learned the algo's and data structures in their college courses?

I know this isn't the point of the video, but ive never used leetcode, but after seening the examples you gave in the video I might give it a try. Don't get me wrong, i have 0 aspirations to get into faang, nor am I the "grind for interviews" type, but solving the problems sounds kinda fun.

I just did a leetcode interview. My thoughts exactly. When I am interviewer, I never do leetcode.

I didn't know LeetCode at all and in an interview I was asked three questions by the platform. They weren't really difficult and in the end it's fun to solve such tasks. I think that's exactly what the companies want to find out, i.e. whether you enjoy it and how you approach such tasks. They don't want people to practice up and down a platform like this. I'm sorry, every developer should be able to solve the simple to intermediate tasks without having to practise.

I had the best job ever! It was kind of a niche. I was programming in Groovy; a language none of my colleagues new about and it required fluent English which I also am. The coding problem I was given was a homework exercise. No timing. No stress. It also was written in such a way that the concepts in the problem were ones I would be seeing on the job. I have worked there for 3 whole years, but my contract ended a month ago. Now, I am back looking for a "normal" job in software development and needing to solve these leetcode problems as fast as possible!

Agree with your take that solving thousands of similar small problems does not really help in the real world when you are faced with a problem you've never seen yet. The approach you take to tackle these problems, is all the difference between a successful software engineer / dev and those who will not get it.

After 25 years of Software Engineering, I can honestly say that I have never heard of LeetCode. I am blessed. After watching this video, it reminds me of preparing for the Engineer In Training exams that are two days long, 8 hours a day. Or maybe for the SAT. In real life, the customer doesn't care and wants the best solution for his problem. The solutions I have found are rarely, and I mean rarely, based on a detailed LeetCode question. God, I hope I never have to deal with this in an interview.

Just a technical question: why has this video only 360p in the video quality list?

The thing is even in Hungary, many small companies and scaleups are doing Leetcode style interview, which you would say that doesn't make any sense. They are not FAANG, they are small and cheap attitude companies and they still do it.

I’ve been doing leetcode everyday for a couple months. Don’t know if it will ever lead to work, but I’m thoroughly enjoying it. It’s like doing the crossword puzzle for me.

i do leetcode for fun to take a break from usual SWE tasks, and tbh I must say the platform itself I quite like. It's the culture, like you mentioned, which is the issue

Leetcode is basically a puzzle site to me that I do for fun.

As far as I can tell from more than three decades working in the IT business, we do not have leetcode-like interview questions at all in the hiring process here in Germany. We don't ask them, we don't have to answer them. I just recently discovered leetcode on my journey to learn Rust, and took some problems there as exercises on how to do that in Rust. I found that quite helpful. The work on one problem even evolved into a small example of computer generated art. It was fun.

Good video, well said.

LC is good for learning CS. That's it.

I am pretty sure she is actively practicing leetcode

Based. It's quite a sham because it's not like most candidate jump straight to the coding. People that grind Leetcode know very well that it is frowned upon, so they pretend they are thinking through the problem when in reality they have the solution pre-cooked 80% or more. I enjoy playing with Leetcode every now and then but I despise the interview culture around it. It has nothing to do with the mental process that you go through with real work. If you are not on a day where your mind is super inspired, you might not get to the working solution on time, but you might solve it with 30 minutes, or 1 or 2 hours more. And that means nothing if you are comparing with a person that solved it in 30'.

I think there is also a certain level of creativity that makes a great developer. My background was in bioinformatics, so using analytical tools like R and Python to draw conclusions from biological data like genomics. I wanted to expand my skills from what was becoming monotonous number crunching so I would make an interactive app for each plot I made. I started out making basic Shiny apps but then started hooking them up to backend dbs like Mongo prettying them up with HTML, CSS, and JS. Then Docker, deployment, and workflow managers, etc. Then I moved onto other frameworks like Svelte. I’m not a true developer, still an analyst, so I’m still not super knowledgeable about development, but I found that for me at least learning software development was more about abstraction and planning than just writing code to solve problems. Understanding how services worked and interacted together help me out heaps. Then the more I built everyday, the more familiar I became with development. I guess also knowing I don’t have a true dev background takes the pressure off to be “good” at it and just have fun with it and make mistakes.

In Faang interviews they do expect you ask question about edge cases, what format to return etc. before starting to write code.