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Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

> I dunno I’ve always felt that the people who can’t leet code are the ones that complain about it.

You mean the ones that randomly receive a random problem that they hadn't memorized before.

If you’re struggling I don’t think you should try to memorize leet code problems, you should try to understand how to apply algorithms.

We know how to apply them, it just that algorithms are not fit all solutions for most type of problems you encounter in the real world. I had to write a frequency analysis code. What I did was search for existing methods, found a paper that provides a mathematical procedure, then convert it to code. The data structures came directly from the OS and thankfully, there were no need to convert them to something else.

I'd say a lot of us learn about algorithms and data structures early in their career. But most of them are guidelines, not rules. So, you just remember how to google for them, not learning specific ones by heart. No one has ever told me: You need to work on this string manipulation and be done within 30mns.

And on the actual job you have two weeks on the sprint with barely any consequence, not time trial to beat the averages set by desperate college kids from Asia.

There’s probably better code writing interviews to be conducted, but I think writing code in an interview is important. I’ve conducted many interviews in C where the candidate has years of C but doesn’t know the stack from the heap.

So I dunno, it’s not fun doing the gimmicky leet code questions but it definitely filters candidates.

I think people in this thread take them for granted… many candidates struggle with them. The ones that think they’re easy and you just gotta study a little bit — they’re honestly probably pretty smart.

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