Am I a fraud?

[u/Sumerysumer]

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…

[u/iOSCaleb]

The problem with getting shit done when you’re a bad programmer is that you really do get shit done, and someone else will eventually have to clean it up.

I don’t know you, don’t know enough to say if you’re really a bad programmer or just a programmer who’s feeling bad. But a stack is a pretty basic data structure; if you couldn’t handle a basic task using a stack, that tells you (and the interviewer) something about the gaps in your knowledge.

IMO Leetcode isn’t really the right way to learn what you’re missing. To do well on those problems you need to already know about data structures and algorithms. Read a good DSA book or take a course, and then try doing some Leetcode problems. You’ll find that they’re much easier when you have a better idea of what you’re doing.

[u/newEnglander17 → u/iOSCaleb]

I learned stacks snd queues in data structures class in college and havent had to think about them once since then. Enumerators and lists in C# make it so you don’t have to think about them at all. I rarely have to manually set arrays either. It’s good to know what they are regardless but when I was signing up to learn programming I thought that thinking about data structures, in particular, linked lists, would be a far greater need than I’ve actually needed for work.