Comment by Bjartr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bjartr | Hacker News Reader

> I'm still not good enough.

Good enough for what, exactly? A person's value as a dev has little to do with how good they are at leetcode problems. What matters is whether or not you can deliver working software and communicate effectively with your team.

Sure, there are some positions where having a truly exceptional ability with algorithms is a significant benefit. Things like graphics and simulation, HFT and squeezing every last drop of performance out of hardware. But, be aware, that's a relatively small subset of work that developers do.

I'm sorry to hear you've burned yourself out on programming as a whole by tunnel-visioning on leetcode problems. Whatever you pursue next, I encourage you to try approaching it from a more holistic direction.

> Good enough for what, exactly?

A FAANG-type eng job. IMO you're right that LC is not a predictor of success as a SWE, but it is for better or worse (I think worse) a gating factor for landing the job. We could talk for hours about how lazy it is to use LC-style problems as the gatekeeper, but the reality is that's what it is (ref: the guy who wrote Homebrew failing Google's interview loop).

OP seems to be conflating LC success with SWE success. LC is not what you need to be a successful and productive engineer, rather it's the prep you have to do if you want to play the FAANG interview game. What OP might be missing is that FAANG isn't the only show out there, and plenty of great non-FAANG companies don't interview this way.

Sadly, many careers now have such gate-keeping tasks, or "hoop jumping":

Medicine/MCAT, Law/LSAT, PhD/GREs, Undergrad/SAT, and for all of the above you need a high GPA, which is not a good measure because it's localized to the school and is not weighted for class difficulty.

My own story: I was pre-med at a deflationary school, I did very well on the MCAT, but my GPA was below average, so I got 0 interviews on 11 apps (thousands down the drain and years of effort too), and decided research was a better field for me than medicine.

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