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Comment by dadoge | Hacker News Reader

Contrary opinion:

If feels very very very wrong to compare a search during April 2020 and now.

Why? The year after April 2020 was a booming job market for SWEs. Hiring managers were competing for talent, 2021 was a boom year of low interest rates, euphoria in private and public markets.

This blog post _should not_ be considered a response to the WSJ article.

And sorry, grinding away at leetcode should only take about 2 months tops if you don’t have to worry having to balance leetcode and your job, and not a tall ask for a 250k+ job in tech. if you don’t need that high a salary, smaller companies generally are more lax about leetcode

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Ok looked the guy up: https://www.stevenbuccini.com/about/

- Studied at Berkeley

- worked at Apple and Uber

And I’m supposed to feel bad for you not wanting to spend a few weeks grinding at leetcode?

This reeks of someone who is very well off, and not an “Everyman” engineer.

I actually agree with the parent here;

grinding leetcode is some dumbshit waste of time that I'm not going to bother with -- I've got code to put in production and this simply is never a good use of my time. When you have an obnoxious hiring process that will take multiple hours for your special company, why would I even waste my time? I can click a few more buttons and have offers elsewhere anyways...

Well the guy who wrote the post had the same opinion as you and his job search took a year as a result…

> dumbshit waste of time that I'm not going to bother with

You're leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table. The hours/money ratio of studying leetcode is pretty good.

> for your special company

At least 1 round of leetcode questions is a requirement for every company I have interviewed with.

> I can click a few more buttons and have offers elsewhere anyways...

If that's actually true, then nevermind.

I hate leetcode too, but I think it's unwise to not conform.

Author also mentions that he didn't have any savings at the time he got laid off. So maybe not the normal person that's worked at Apple for 10 years and cashing out RSUs but someone who did short stints at each.

> The year after April 2020 was a booming job market for SWEs.

Did we know that at the time, though? From what I remember, it was all doom and gloom: public markets were trending downward, people were talking about recession and corporate belt-tightening, and the assumption was that we'd see a lot of layoffs, and the labor market would get tight.

True, that's not what happened (at least in the case of knowledge workers) -- in most cases it was the opposite -- but I don't think we had that foresight back in April 2020.

Anecdotal but over the past 20 years I've held about eight different positions in various companies as a software engineer, and I've never even so much as glanced at leetcode. I've been able to live comfortably and put plenty away for the future with 150 to 200K salary.

I feel like companies that emphasize interviews prioritizing rote memorization aren't going to be a good culture fit for me anyway.

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