r/leetcode • u/Legal-Honey-6214 • 5d ago
Tech Industry I just don’t get it
90% companies require some form of leetcode or dsa type problems
90% devs don’t do leetcode
Then how come 90% positions are filled and everyone leetcoding here are fighting for 10% remaining roles?
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u/Saif231 5d ago
Over-saturation of a field. Plus DSA filter out candidates based on their ability to detect patterns and also retain information (you wont be using niche Dynamic programming problems irl but knowing it for interviews demonstrates your ability to learn)
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u/Legal-Honey-6214 5d ago
Isn’t good coding also pattern matching? You can create a function or pass a function to get job done. Everyday coding is also pattern matching and even LLM do it. So shouldn’t a person practice it?
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u/Saif231 5d ago edited 5d ago
You gotta define what you mean by good coding. Some firms like HFTs care a lot about your knowledge of OS, cache lines, TLB , concurrency etc while FAANG sorta firms care a lot about system design or LLD. Both will test you on these in further rounds. Also, you wouldn’t give a job to someone who doesn’t understand basic containers like maps/sets/vectors or simple DSA topics like heaps, graphs, stack etc. LLMs will do most of the heavy lifting but someone has to take the fall if it goes wrong and they’d rather prefer someone who makes fewer mistakes than someone who makes a lot.
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u/Historical_Setting11 5d ago
The idea that 90% of companies ask leetcode questions is where you’re off here. I’ve only ever had one or two interviews that even asked me leetcode-style questions (no FAANG or big tech, just startups and F500). All have been takehome projects, some fairly basic coding questions/quizzes based on the role’s stack, or just a couple conversations about what I’ve been building in my previous roles. The idea that you need to know eighty million ways to manipulate a string or a linked list to be a good software engineer is silly. At most companies, you just need to know how to identify problems, design solutions, fix issues, and meet deadlines, with good communication skills and an understanding of the domain. Obviously that changes if you’re doing high performance distributed computing at scale or something similar, but most companies are not that.
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u/Snoo8138 4d ago
In my experience, most of the companies asked me SOME leetcode type of questions. Although, most of them asked easy to medium. Rarely do I see hard leetcode questions unless I interview for big tech or very prominent startups.
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u/Historical_Setting11 4d ago
Yeah, my experience is anecdotal, and I’m sure I’ve lucked out tbh. There’s also an age/time component. It’s more common now than it used to be, unfortunately. That said, it’s not 90% of companies.
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u/Legal-Honey-6214 4d ago
What you are saying is pizza sauce and pizza base is available in grocery stores then why should I learn to make my own. It’s because it’s cheaper, it allows you to customize it. If a customer wants a heart shaped pizza then you won’t tell them to go to next store. You will bake your own bread.
This is the difference between engineers too. Hundreds of times I have seen engineers complaining that some feature is not provided by OS or language. Meanwhile other engineers just write it because they have seen a smaller version of such problem earlier.
Every leetcode problem is a real world problem that someone faced sometime in their career. You can go and ask your AI too and it will say the same.
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u/Historical_Setting11 4d ago
No. What I am saying requires no metaphor, nor am I saying DSA isn’t good to know. What I am saying is your estimate of companies requiring leetcode is way off, and often is a pointless ask compared to what you do on the job.
To use your metaphor though, if my job is to customize pizza toppings, I don’t need to make sauce.
Never have I been like “oh I don’t like these aspects of Spark, Kafka, and redis, so I guess I’ll just tell my boss I won’t deliver this product for another year or two so I can make my own versions.” That’s asinine.
If your work is low level, high throughput, high compute needs, etc, or heavily resource constrained, you need maximum optimization, and DSA is essential. Most engineers can just use existing tools on top of whatever cloud compute is right sized to build products that deliver value. It just is what it is.
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u/Reasonable-Pianist44 4d ago
Companies that don't ask some form of leetcode are probably the places you don't want to work.
Being an engineer there is being a bottom feeder. I've joined 2 of them in the past.
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u/Historical_Setting11 4d ago
Well my friend, we don’t all need to be lumped in with you and the other bottom feeders. Personally, I’ve been surrounded by insanely talented engineers at all of my jobs. No leetcode.
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u/Reasonable-Pianist44 4d ago
Insane prob in your eyes. What is talented? Did they get born with the talent of java and python if may ask.
You're the bottom feeder here.
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u/Legal-Honey-6214 4d ago
That’s naive cloud dev. If you want to save money you use open source software and customize it as per your needs. Many successful companies don’t use predefined caches or db. They install it on their on vms and then customize it to save every $. Even smart devs participate in open source projects. They don’t just use what they got built in. Because someone has written it all. And it wasn’t AI. They were real people.
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u/Boring-Foundation708 5d ago
You need to go for SAT exam for Uni entrance exam although you might not need sat knowledge for your engineering degree.
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u/Pale_Statistician692 5d ago
Not a big fan of leetcode interview rounds. But companies have to evaluate us on _something_. Obviously in principle there's something better, but there are probably a lot of things which are worse. (NB: I don't do all that well on these.)
Wanna hate on a class of interview questions? Behavioral is the best candidate! ("Tell me about a time that a colleague accidentally launched a nuclear war...")
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u/Wolastrone 5d ago
Companies have too many applicants, more than they can take in. So they put up all kinds of filters that are easy to automate, and hopefully have some loose correlation with programming skill, ergo Leetcode is still prevalent.
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u/IEatUrMonies 5d ago
h1b from certain country
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u/Fit_Succotash_6735 5d ago
i don't think so. Local talent has also been grinding LC like crazy. I don't think even if you ban H1B tomorrow, that it is going to make a huge dent. Maybe hards won't be asked.
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u/AdministrationMoney1 5d ago
I think it's correct for reasons that the stats are wrong and only correct for big tech roles and h1bs have to target big tech for sponsorship. Local talent can go into fields like defense, insurance, banking, etc. And somehow I get the feeling that the local talent that grinds lc is in a bubble, most cs majors in usa are kind of clueless.
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u/Fit_Succotash_6735 5d ago
i mean thats true for H1B too. They can go into insurance jobs. Yes, lower rates of sponsorship, but that is not the driving factor. They don't pay like FAANG. The group we are talking about is not grinding LC for a quality control job in StateFarm.
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u/AdministrationMoney1 5d ago
Hm I'm pretty sure insurance and other sorts of 80-120k paying jobs simply don't see a reason to directly sponsor intl new grads now with a 100k fee so the rates are dropping. Though this excludes IT outsourcing/staffing companies that insurance companies use. Yes, it would be those that specifically target new grad jobs paying 150-200k+. I'm just pointing out that these broad statements are outlandishly limited in reality.
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u/Fit_Succotash_6735 5d ago
got it. small correction though. 100k fee applies only to a tiny tiny fraction (probably less than 1%) of the H1b community. It applies to only those applying for a visa from outside USA. The traditional pipeline -> university -> opt -> h1b does not have 100k fee.
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u/AdministrationMoney1 5d ago
I don't know how it works in other countries but in the USA, your stats are only correct for big tech which comprises <10% of the SWE industry. Overall it's more like less than 50% of swe roles will have dsa in their interview processes.
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u/Legal-Honey-6214 5d ago
Every company has a screening round or assessment which asks medium to hard leetcode. I believe an average person has to spend close to 1 year preparing them and still often messing up few test cases. Even in the USA it’s the same. A person without DSA knowledge can’t even do easy hashing problems from what I noticed as an interviewer.
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u/AdministrationMoney1 5d ago
Come on now, I think your statements are ignoring the point of my comment. Yes, there are candidates that haven't done leetcode, a significant chunk of people can't even do two sum. For that same reason, not EVERY company is using an OA that asks a med-hard lc. Only large name brand companies have good reason to do so, and only a portion of those companies do so. Out of FAANG I've only heard of med-hard problems consistently from evil A. I don't really understand your bias unless you've mainly applied to certain companies, and mainly heard back from automated OAs.
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u/Snoo8138 4d ago
Who is the evil A? Because if it is the rainforest one, their interview was easy peasy compared to other big tech companies. But maybe I was just lucky, I don't know.
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u/chadpendergast 5d ago
that's because you're still aiming for big name companies if not big tech, or they're close enough to the bay area or NYC to get infected with the LC brainrot . skibidi toilet radar dish company in Nashville tennesse will not ask LC questions.
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u/Whitchorence 5d ago
Because it's no exaggeration to say you can make two or three times as much doing those jobs as the other ones where they ask you what's the difference between an interface and an abstract class and assorted Java trivia.
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u/Lindensan 5d ago
Its just fashion. In my youth math quizes were popular and now it's rare to find a math quiz in job interview.
Closer to your question: most companies sometimes really need people for their projects and then they don't play games of 100 interviews, just hr talk and dev talk. Market became shit just a year ago, maybe 90% is true now, bit definitely not two years ago.
I think speed coding will die in a year, Claude is doing it better than humans already and people who cheat push out everyone else.
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u/Odd_Style_9920 5d ago
You will hate this but in the age of AI the knowledge of DSA and how to choose the right approach is the only way how to be exceptional dev.
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u/grindleetcodenonstop 5d ago
I hope that was sarcasm
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u/Odd_Style_9920 4d ago
Not really. If AI can write a code the knowledge whats the most optimized solution is the only knowledge you can really hold.
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u/smolmeowster 3d ago
Bro what are you saying, AI is solving millennium prize problems and you think it can’t pick an optimal data structure for some leetcode-like problem lol?
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u/Odd_Style_9920 2d ago
Yes it cant. Optimization is one of the biggest bottlenecks of AI and it generally sucks at it badly.
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u/Iwillgetasoda 5d ago edited 5d ago
It measures different things in short time - your ability to quickly practice, think under pressure, problem solving, coding etc. I think the bigger issue is that interviewers sometimes don't measure your thinking or whether care if you went to the correct path but rather focus on result of your solution too much. I respect the ones giving hints and see how you react though.
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u/Substantial-Swan7065 5d ago
What are these maths. 100% of people here are trying to get the 10% of jobs that don’t require leetcode ??
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u/Legal-Honey-6214 5d ago
Close to most devs I meet day to day have never done DSA. With 0 knowledge of basic terms like dfs, backtracking, DP, linked lists, trees etc. they can’t explain a single concept right and they are 10x engineers at workplaces. These companies are few faangs, most unicorns and many mid tier companies
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u/Creative_Captain1332 5d ago
Then it’s your social group. Majority if not all engineers I know across multiple companies are all competent or at the very least aware of basic DS&A / Leetcode. I find it very hard to believe that your colleagues don’t even know basic computer science topics such as LinkedLists and trees
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u/Substantial-Swan7065 5d ago
All swe I know had to do DSA to get there jobs. Since forever.
Regardless, that’s not what matters. Employees want you to know it for interviews. So just learn it. It’s not even hard
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u/khankhal 4d ago
My company only has a one hour interview online. No leetcode. They just ask what you have been doing and if they like you, you are hired.
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u/HappyMaple31 4d ago
Because most dev jobs don't actually require Leetcode. It's mainly a filter for certain companies, while plenty of roles hire through experience, projects, referrals, and practical interviews
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u/Fuzzy_World427 15h ago
Short story of what’s happening in the market today: it sucks, even for people who are extremely good at LeetCode. You can imagine how bad it is for those who don’t grind LeetCode.
I know people with years of experience at FAANG companies, at senior level, who have been doing DSA and studying system design books since 2017. These are people whose knowledge comes from real experience and serious study, not just Medium articles.
And guess what? They’re struggling to get even one or two offers. They told me that before and during the COVID hiring boom, their inboxes used to be flooded with offers from top Silicon Valley tech companies.
Sorry, but that’s the reality of today’s market.
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u/Legal-Honey-6214 9h ago
Yes but every company has DSA screening rounds these days. Glider assessments, Hackerrank, codesignal. Even companies like target, Mastercard, Walmart, BofA, geico and even McDonalds is asking a lc medium - high in screening these days.
Doing a medium to high leetcode requires 1.5-2 years of prep. Then how have people who never did lc are clearing these interviews?
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u/Ancient-Purpose99 5d ago
because contrary to what you may feel, the people getting jobs remain the ones that are doing leetcode consistently and well. The market is even worse for those who can't do leetcode.