In 2017, I was failing all my coding interviews.
I wanted to land a job at a high-tech company. So, I would spend hours practicing on LeetCode. Still, I would fail to solve any new problem or, worse, fail at problems I've already solved before.
Until one day, a Google software engineer said to me:
"You can't succeed without first understanding Data Structures & Algorithms."
That day, my whole life changed.
I realized that, indeed, he was right. Since I didn't have a proper CS degree, I wasn't comfortable with data structures like trees, priority queues, or algorithms like DFS (Depth-First Search), BFS (Breadth-First Search), etc.
So I decided to pick up a book: "Introduction to Algorithms, MIT Press" and go through it during my entire holiday break.
This was another AHA moment. After reading this book:
I could finally make sense of
big OnotationI could solve a ton of problems with
DFS,BFS,...etc.
I also realized that there were some common patterns for solving problems. Thus, just learning one opened the door to solving multiple challenges.
As a result, I was able to:
pass several interviews at companies like Bloomberg, Yelp
get a job offer at Pinterest, where I actually had to solve a tree problem 🤣
and more importantly, land my current job
——
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