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Comment by seestraw | Hacker News Reader

"You didn't study CS in school?"

Quite an entitled comment. Studying CS in school doesn't mean you've learned everything there is while practicing programming. Yes, you learn these skills on the job, but doing programming interview questions helped me learn skills too.

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Frankly, as a return student, most students I've encountered at my crappy state school are incredibly entitled. On top of that, don't know how to code. That's because my shitty state school lumped in programming with general IT support as if they're the same field. I don't understand why a network analyst or database admin needs to know about OOP or Algorithms when the most complicated thing they're gonna do is work with AD or maybe manage a server.

It's not an entitled comment, it's a genuine question. If you claim you "had no framework" you need to explain why.

The point of any CS curriculum is just that, providing you with a framework (which should ideally be a balance of theoretical and practical knowledge). It doesn't teach you the job. Neither do leetcode questions.

Sorry if I misunderstood. I don't think most CS curriculums teach you analyzing programs and writing them efficiently. My data structures and algorithms classes were great but still not enough practical knowledge to implement programs day to day. On top of that, there was practically no code review. I don't think there's enough time for professors and TAs to analyze your code and tell you if this is a good way of doing things or is it clean or will it waste a lot of memory.

Still, leetcode might teach you to write code that passes time and memory constraints, but it certainly won't teach you how to write clean code that passes a code review.

I agree. I don't think Leetcode is a good reflection of programming interviews. In programming interviews, you're supposed to have a sound thought process, write clean code, and don't need to pass hundreds of test cases. Leetcode is just a programming environment that, imo, is not the same as a programming interview.

I'd rather learn interview algorithms from books. And by getting feedback from trusted peers.

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