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No.

Before I interview, I definitely spend a couple of evenings working through leetcode exercises to sharpen up on those kinds of problems. But it’s just that, a couple of hours to sharpen up working in that format - the foundation that lets me perform in the interviews is my existing skills in the field.

I actually think of it as akin to running - the thing that makes the difference is your base of aerobic fitness, but you perform best in a race if you spend some time sharpening for it.

I’ve generally not found coding interviews to be a barrier to getting good offers either on-site in the Bay Area or working remotely.

I’ve also never felt like the questions I face in interviews are totally out of alignment with the work I do. They’re not the entirety of the work I do, but they’re usually a decent distillation of the hard parts of some aspect of the “writing code” element of the job.

I also think people get way too hung up on them. At the on-site stage, honestly, I think more people fail on the more holistic system design and architecture problems than on the pure coding ones.



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