Leetcode : The stuff of nightmares

Let’s say my life is an array of events, just for fun you know, or let’s say it’s even a list(ha!), or if I’m feeling “optimal” and want to remember it by the really cool stuff that happened during that time, my life is literally a hashmap of events( I swear I feel my ancestors passing away for the second time, reading this).

Anywho! The NP problem in my life currently is that when I access the event with the key “Graduated with MS in CS”, I see stuff, I see blurry stuff, then suddenly I see 2 Sum, then I see trapping rainwater, then I see reverse a linked list, I see neetcode, I see Blind 75, I see the freaking sliding window. I’m crying, it’s not even funny. You know, for so long, cats have been the one thing I’ve feared to death but now we have another one that knocked cats off their table. You guessed it! It’s leet code (I mean you didn’t have to guess, I literally put it up as the title). Trying to catch up with the leet code monkeys has been like the Tortoise and Hare algorithm, I try to think up my own solution, but I can’t then I see a whole lot of people coming up with excellent solutions and I’m disgusted(literally disgusted) Like, stop. Can we stop for a second, please? Can we wait and catch a breath, please? can we wait up for me, please? I’m over here trying to do a BFS!

I tried, you know I tried doing it, doing 10 leetcodes per day and all that hullabaloo, I tried running up a binary search algorithm to find the motivation, and still, it was nowhere to be found. I keep seeing these articles with astoundingly humorous titles such as “You’re doing leetcode wrong” Apparently there’s a correct way to do leetcode? forgive me but i didn’t know there was a correct way to die a slow painful death ? Everytime I see the orangey black logo I can see my life being sucked out of me; I’m not kidding, I see it like I see my rejection emails (i.e. every other day). Like come on now! Don’t get me wrong, two sum, I can do it, trust me I know how to do it with optimal time complexity(use a hashmap, see?). Can we stop at that, please? why are we trying to be fancy?what do we have to prove?

Okay storytime; I got some interviews and did half ass job at solving the leet code problems they gave me. It felt like an exam, they ask a question and it’s tick tock tick tock in my mind, I can hear nothing but the time going tick tock tick tock , wait what problem was it? and I have to explain what I’m thinking? Oh I’m thinking tick tock tick tock. And then its time limit exceeded for me; email next day reads “Thank you for taking your time… but you suck so we’ll hire better candidates… please review our interview process”.

Let me rant okay? let me rant! So apparently, we’re supposed to learn patterns, like these AI models, why? Am I a machine? Why do I need to learn a pattern? No thank you, I’ll ask ChatGPT how to do it! Better, I’ll ask it to explain the solution to me like I am five, and sweet lord it does, it so does. Now I and leetcode have a problem, Dynamically, and greedily, I tried to fix it but remains unresolved.

Meanwhile, the lives of my friends and colleagues are being sorted in ascending order with “TC” as the key, and I just tried to understand one leet code question for 10 minutes, dropped some tears, and started writing this.

So annoying! Hello? I’m talking to you! Companies that didn’t hire me! It’s so annoying! I would be great at work, like what do you guys want? some buttons, right? at the end of the day it’s all buttons, isn’t it? You think I cannot make buttons? I would make the best button you’ve ever seen if you would just let me, but nooo you want me to collect rainwater. Well, Array index out of bounds for you.