Some leetcode tips - part 1

Before I begin, I will share my blind tax: TC when I joined Block (Q3 August 2021) - 475K (L6, 15+ YOE) I have mentored many engineers throughout my career and interviewed hundreds if not engineers in all kinds of levels (including some managers - coding tasks and system design). I am not a genius when it comes to CS fundamentals, and although I like the challenge of Leetcoding, I have ADHD and I always look for new ways to improve the "Leetcoding experience". I have started recently a career consulting/interview prepping business (I am an ex Amazonian, and got in the past other FAANG offers), and I will share with you some tips I share with my clients: a. Not all companies ask you to code in an interview session without running your code. b. Leetcode probably has the. worst online IDE, compared to coder pad, code signal, and other tools you might be using in online coding interviews. c. I would seriously consider using your favorite IDE, whether its VS code, or IntelliJ, or any other editor to speed up your prep. The question of whether the online coding tool you will use in your interview has "auto-completion"/"IntelliSense" is less important, what matters is that you cover (and understand the solutions) of various problems covering CS fundamentals. d. If the company allows you to run the code during the interview, don't wait until the last moment to run it, organize your code in a modular way, divide it into sub-functions, make sure that these functionals are testable, and write simple tests, even prints would do for the test, no need to develop mini unit testing framework during the interview. I will provide more tips in the next posts.