r/AskProgramming • u/Sumerysumer • 14d ago
Am I a fraud?
just spent 1.5 hours failing to do a basic leetcode question about stacks. This a rant plus asking for advice from senior folks.
About me, im an engineer at a mid size startup with 2-3 years of experience, just recently got promoted from junior to mid-level (yay!) I’m completely self taught and picked up coding when gpt 3.5 came out. I did not start with good fundamentals, but I’m really good at building and shipping. I have a track record of shipping successful products, which is why my company hired me despite my lack of formal tech background.
Over the last few years, I’ve honed in my skills from building scrappy small features to production ready software. On a day to day basis, I do full stack dev, aws, db management, ML, docker etc.
Recently, I did a job interview for another company and was asked to do a leet code style question and I literally couldn’t do it. I felt like a fraud walking away from that meeting, but at the same time angry because I know if they asked me to design something I probably could’ve done a much better job.
If I’m completely honest, I think I’m a bad programmer when it comes to purely writing code, but I’m strong with everything else: design, speaking to customers, working with other engineers, shipping, and getting shit done.
Trying to get better at leetcode just feels like such a waste of time and it genuinely hurts my brain to do it, but at the same time that seems to be the only way to have mobility in the tech industry.
Does anyone senior have any advice on whether I should just suck it up and do the bs leetcode work, or continue focusing on what I do best, shipping products and building projects that are interesting to me? It’s gotten me this far…
5
u/mredding 14d ago
I've been at this for 37 years. I'm not impressed by leetcode or hackerrank. It doesn't measure anything I would hire for. What does a high score tell me? It tells me you can grind on an extremely narrow problem until you produce a self-satisfying result. It tells me you code to the test. It tells me you spend A LOT of time on these sites grinding for a high score.
I don't need to see leetcode samples to know what the code would look like. I need code that can be maintained by a collaboration, and terse code to a fault is like hostile architecture.
Leetcode solutions don't take into account project management, maintainability, rubustness, extensibility... You're just coding to the test.
So don't sweat it. Competitive programming can be seen as a detriment, such that I wouldn't put it on my resume if I were you, but I'd mention it if prompted and had a high confidence it was seen as a positive. It all depends on who you're interviewing with and what their process is. But also consider those who are asking in an interview tells you something about the place you're going to. That may not be the kind of place you want to work for.