LeetCode Isnt Real | Prime Reacts

I CHEAT ALL THE TIME, I MEMORIZED ENGLISH TO UNDERSTAND THE INTERVIEWER AND GOT AWAY WITH IT

LET HIM COOK 🍳

Skill you spend the most effort on in college software engineering: Calculus. Hardest test in interviews: Insanely specific domain knowledge and algorithms. 99.9% of programming jobs: Trying to slowly explain to a manager why what they're asking for is not only a logical contradiction, and impossible, but if it were possible it would be a terrible idea. There is close to 0 crossover between these domains.

The "Moral of the story, do math on a farm." chat killed me, lol.

- Pass an interview with complex algorithms - Start working - Use complex algorithms to improve performance - Get comments on code review "too complex, people will not understand how that works"

Interviewing now and even 5 years ago is a day and night difference. I say this as someone that's been in the industry and now being involved the process.

I like how my current workplace does coding interviews. They give you a project before your interview, and you work on a solution, and then present it at the interview. This is a more realistic way to measure how good someone is at doing stuff you would be doing at work. At work you won't be solving algorithm problems from your head, you'll work on a project, and have the ability to look at documentation, look online, etc.

I feel like most people totally misunderstood neetcode's point. The original justification for it being used for interviews was that it showed a candidate's logical reasoning skills and understanding of core CS concepts. That's why it would hypothetically be a good way to evaluate someone. But then people just started memorizing everything, and so it became an arms race where everyone has to memorize everything to be competetive, and so now it doesn't serve as a measure of logical reasoning or high level CS fundamental, it's just a measure of who studied the hardest. Which, for better or for worse, is just a fundamentally different measurement. It'd kinda like if you could massively improve your score by studying for an IQ test. It wouldn't really be an IQ test anymore. It would still measure... something. But it wouldn't be measuring IQ.

“Never memorize something that you can look up.” ― Albert Einstein

I love when Prime nitpicks an argument that he didn't understood for 30 minutes straight and gets angry at chat for pointing the fact that he didn't understood the very simple premise. That's exactly why I come here, to get angry.