How proficient does one need to be with DSA in order to be considered a competitive hire?
So after 2.5 months of learning JavaScript, I took part in today’s weekly Leetcode contest. I completed the FCC Javascript module about 3 weeks ago and have been reviewing with javascript.info since then.
I have been studying a lot and was fairly confident in my DSA skills after breezing through the Javascript Projects, but I did so poorly today. It took me 3.5 hours to solve just 1 of the 4 problems, and it was marked one of the “easy” ones, too. The top ranked programmers solved all 4 problems in about 20 minutes.
The question I solved was Count Pairs of Similar Strings and my code was not very elegant.
I have so far submitted two other Leetcode problems, and they both seemed harder than the Intermediate Algorithm Challenges on FCC. I had to look up solutions to help me understand them.
I do plan to continue growing and improving. I enjoy the process. That said, how quantitatively gifted does one have to be get hired in this field? I hear working programmers joking that all they do is maintain code and copy / paste from libraries.
Do you have to be like, an Algorithm Rainman in order to land a decent developer role? A lot of the Project Euler and Leetcode “hard” questions, I can’t even imagine solving them on my own. I also read people’s CodePen scripts for games like Pong and Chess and do not understand what is going on. I have been enjoying the struggle and growth so far, but I would be really discouraged to eventually discover that this field ultimately requires a level of giftedness that I just do not possess.
Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated.