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Comment by blutoot | Hacker News Reader

Wanted to respond to a few comments about why motivation has been an issue for me up until this point.

It is an issue simply because leetcode grinding makes me feel like all my 10+ years of commitment to my previous employer (often foolishly at the expense of my personal well-being) and all the things I have contributed and picked up on the way mean nothing / nada / zilch to my future prospective employers. The whole prep process makes me feel like I need to start from scratch and nothing that I did in the past matters at all. I find this extremely frustrating.

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I understand your frustration.

You can't change the past, and you can't control how companies interview. Focus on what you can control.

Any overlap between interview skills and job performance is a coincidence.

You have to accept this on a visceral level.

Alternatively, remember that the reason the company is making you jump through these hoops is that there are many other candidates who are equally qualified.

Competent people do pass the filter, but what Leetcode interviews do filter out are people with a shred of creativity who just won't submit themselves to the drudgery of studying useless crap for an interview – the kind of people who need purpose to always align with work or part of them dies. Avoiding these people is great for a company that's all about boosting it's ad revenue, and also great for the applicant who dodged a bullet.

I get it but it's sort of a strange thing to ask people to accept no?

like asking people to accept that 1+1=3. or that the day after Monday is Thursday. maybe that's the real function of these hoops -- selecting people who are good at doublethink

I wouldn't say it's as clear cut as that. One can make a reasonable argument for why the leetcode grind is the lesser evil.

If the goal is to keep your motivation up, you have to find some joy in the activity itself.

If solving leetcode is the only way to differentiate candidates, then its meaningless and is not accomplishing anything.

Only those who can't or won't invest time creating a meaningful interview process fall back to leetcode.

It is accomplishing something. When 40 different applicants are equally able to do the job, the only selector you have is "culture fit", which is where bias starts to easily kick in (race, age, whatever), and that is a legal risk.

The leetcode hoops exist to provide a provably objective measure for hiring, even though that measure is unrelated to job performance. It's purely a lawsuit avoidance mechanism.

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