Does LeetCoding improves our coding knowledge or is it a flex symbol for developers.
For the people who doesn’t know leetcode, It is an online platform to practice various coding problems with different levels of complexity.
I started my career as a FE developer with blazingly fast(although it is not) React and Next JS like most of us out there, but later realized that FE it’s not a thing for me, I personally felt kinda of bored or doing some repetitive stuffs, that’s when i thought of moving on to a BE development(OG Software Engineer).
Of course, to make this switch over either i need to do a internal job switch for BE role or i need to do DSA and Algo’s stuff to clear the interview process for BE role and move to some other organization, i did the later part. I started coding in hackerrank, freecodecamp etc, then i realized most of the so called linkedIn flexers use leetcode to flex their coding knowledge, So i also wanted to do that shit :(
Started my leetcode from here and nearly solved 150+ (YES AM FLEXING) problems in 1.5years of timespan, but after nearly 2 years i got so many questions asking myself do i really need Leetcode now, do i need to solve problems daily, do i need to maintain my daily streak, do i need to Leetcode for my next interview process. Personally i don’t know how to get out from all these questions, but i did some of the things to answer all the above questions to myself, which am gonna share it below.
To simply answer the question, it could be Yes and No. Leetcode is really useful if we are a complete beginner to problem solving or if we are just starting our college/career or for anyone who wants to improve their problem solving techniques, once you got some hands on or once you got enough confidence of thinking on how to solve any problem and how to choose a DataStructure for a given situation, then Leetcode shouldn’t even be on the developer daily task list.
My personal take on Leetcode is once you got comfortable with solving 80–100 problems(based on the complexity it can be easy(50%), medium(40%), hard(10%)) you are good to get out from the Leetcode Hell.
As said above once you got enough comfortable from leetcode, just move out of it and get into the real Software Engineering, there are multiple stuffs to learn in software engineering, once i realized that am doing too much leetcode, I somehow got out of it and started to learn things like OS, Database internals, how CLI works, how to publish our backend app in our own baremetal server(could be our personal computer) etc, these things really helped me alot to understand my BE better, so folks that already in Leetcode hell, try to remember that there are alot more things to know as a developer rather than doing competitive coding.
So yeah! as said above one can use Leetcode for a certain level(which is necessary as i feel), but dont trap into it like myself, just get of it whenever you feel confidence in problem solving, and started building things.