My Hot Take On The Leetcode Obsession

Can we talk about leetcode for a minute?

Seriously, What the hell are we spending our time on?

The Problem With the LeetCode Grind

Give any LeetCode problem to an AI, and it can solve it in a couple of minutes.

If that’s the reality now, why are we still grinding hundreds or thousands of problems?

Honestly, I’m bored of solving the same patterns again and again. People talk about “mastering” problems, but the truth is:

Nobody remembers how to solve every problem they solved months ago

Unless you’re an AI… or an Asian. (those guys are just on another level)

It’s not even a skill issue. A lot of these problems require remembering subtle tricks or patterns. When you grind them repeatedly, you’re not really learning - You’re memorizing nuances.

Real problem solving requires time to analyze and think.

But grinding 1000+ problems forces you to recall patterns, not think.

We're Solving The Wrong Problems

Look around you

There's so much more interesting stuff:

• Learning Linux
• Understanding how OS works
• Exploring AI, MCP, Orchestration
• Diving into awesome Open Source Projects
• Contributing to Open Source
• Building Automations
• Learning how to scale real apps

There's an entire universe of things that are actually interesting and useful.

And more importantly, there are real, unsolved problems.

Meanwhile we’re spending hours mastering interview puzzles. Not one, not two, but thousands.

But Recruiters Care About It, Right?

Yeah, sure. Many companies still use DSA interviews.

But honestly, what sounds cooler?

• Solving 3000+ LeetCode problems
• Or running Arch Linux, automating stuffs, building stuff, and having a crazy Neovim setup?

One is grinding puzzles.

The other is building and understanding real systems.

The Reason I Got Into Computers

I was excited about computers in my childhood, not because it would get me a job and pay well. I did, because it was fascinating, exciting and FUN.

• Playing GTA Vice City, Doom was fun.
• Setting cool wallpapers and screensavers in your old windows laptop was fun.
• Opening the terminal for the first time was fun.
• Writing your own tiny C++ programs in Turbo C that did some basic math and feeling ridiculously proud that it worked was fun.
• Building your first little tool, like a GPA calculator cause you needed it, was fun.
• Watching your site go live and refreshing the page 10 times, just to see it worked, was fun.

Computers were -- and still are -- fun.

The fun wasn’t in chasing optimization tricks or memorizing patterns.

Leetcode is not fun
(Atleast, not for me)

A Better Way To Look At This

Learning DSA Matters, But grinding 1000 problems Does Not

Let’s be clear about one thing: DSA is important.

Stuff like Trees, Graphs, Recursion, Hash maps, Linked lists are fundamental ideas in computer science, They show up everywhere.

Learning them is absolutely worth your time.

But there’s a big difference between learning something new and grinding same pattern again and again.

Solve a few problems to understand how these structures work.

That's valuable.

What isn’t valuable is solving hundreds or thousands of problems just to memorize patterns for interviews.

There are amazing competitive programming platforms like Codeforces, CodeChef, AtCoder.

If you enjoy competitive programming, go all in. Compete, Solve, Climb the rankings, become a Grandmaster or something.

But doing it not because it's fun, but only because companies demand it is where things become messed up.

So Leetcode is the problem, Right?

The problem isn’t even LeetCode itself.

The problem is the culture we built around it.

The culture where:

• “Solve the Top 100 FAANG Repeated Questions”
• “Comment CheatSheet to Get 2026 FAANG CheatSheet”
• “Memorize these patterns and you'll crack any interview”

somehow became the holy grail of becoming a good engineer.

It isn't.

And honestly, the problem isn’t the platforms.

The problem is us.

We turned interview puzzles into the ultimate benchmark of engineering ability.

Personally, I’d take real system knowledge over a 3000+ LeetCode badge on LinkedIn any day.

Final Thoughts

I did waste my time on this for a long time.

Following a DSA sheet. Solving every problem. Taking notes. Then coming back after a month to solve them again.

But recently, I met some cool people doing things I actually found exciting. They knew a lot of stuff about systems.

• running their own homelabs
• customizing Linux setups
• contributing to open source
• understanding how systems really work All the stuff I always wanted to explore.

Yet I kept pushing those things aside because “I should probably solve a few more LeetCode problems first.”

Looking back, that was probably the wrong priority.

This post is mostly a reminder to myself that:

You have two choices

Follow the boring manual and be the 1001st guy, who did the same thing successfully.

Or take a leap of faith on what your heart says. Because in the end, all that really matters is that you had fun along the way.

Have fun.