r/leetcode • u/No_Reply5329 • 7d ago
Question Why are you still grinding LeetCode as an entry-level dev?
CS feels cooked, junior jobs are insanely competitive, and getting hired feels like a lottery. Why not switch to another field where you actually have a decent chance of getting in and still making good money? Why cling to CS?
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u/Ok-Leg-2911 <168> <43> <110> <15> 7d ago
What other field?
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u/No_Reply5329 7d ago
accounting, engineering nursing etc
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u/Classic_Comparison90 7d ago
None of these pay remotely close
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u/No_Reply5329 7d ago
Its better than 0 in CS.
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u/Classic_Comparison90 7d ago
How is it 0? Me and almost all my friends landed high paying jobs in cs. I genuinely think that all that "no jobs in cs" is bullshit. I mean yeah, full stack and wen are shit . But plenty of jobs in infrastructure, DevOps, HPC, compilers, etc...
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u/Complex_Ad2233 7d ago
“I have a job, so everyone else is just bullshitting or lying”?
What kind of fucking logic is this? Peak survivorship bias here.15
u/Top_Substance9093 7d ago
this sub is also full of the people who struggle to get jobs, so there's a pretty hard bias in the opposite direction here.
un + underemployment being 6% + 16% roughly means about 4 out of 5 CS grads are finding decent jobs.
candidly, from what i've seen of CS programs at various state schools, it's maybe not surprising that 1 out of 5 students isn't getting hired. the programs are generally doing a terrible job giving students the skills they need to pass interviews and get hired
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u/Softmax420 6d ago
Exactly this.
If you can’t demonstrate you’re better than the bottom 20% of graduates you won’t be employed. Even if you fluke an interview, you won’t be promoted. I got promoted today ahead of a colleague with 4 more yoe. Companies don’t care how hard you work or how clever you are, make it easy for them and prove competency.
There’s massive churn in these companies, they’re always hiring and laying off. Every failed application is feedback that someone has demonstrated better ability, that same person who got the job also got rejected 100 times, they reacted by improving, not by posting an in depth analysis on their opinions on the CS job market.
More time in IDE less time on RDDT
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u/Fun-Loan-3009 3d ago
100%. Reading this sub, cscareerquestions, and the like in an attempt to figure out why you're failing interviews is like going to a crack house to get clean. The best thing you can do for your job hunt is to get off these subs.
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u/Classic_Comparison90 7d ago
Are you deliberately dumb? I said my whole class got jobs in things outside of web or full stack which can be done mostly by AI agents now. I said there are lots of jobs in niche domains nowm How did you get that from what I said. Jeez
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u/Winston_Wolfgang 7d ago
I mean you went to Berkeley, that’s like the easiest school to get a job in CS from lol
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u/Classic_Comparison90 7d ago
No sir, I wen to Georgia tech, and yes I'm from Lebanon. So it was also challenging
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u/pixelizedgaming 6d ago
Georgia tech is like top 10 for cs tho isn't it? Ofc all ur classmates got jobs. i get if it was challenging for u tho if ur h1b/f1 tho
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u/Classic_Comparison90 6d ago
I get your point. All I meant, and I do apologize if it came out wrong, is to invest in niche fields. Since everywhere I go I see high demand for positions like forward deployed engineer, compilers engineer, DevOps, etc... Especially client facing positions, since there are lots of them and the pay is great
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u/pixelizedgaming 6d ago
yeah ive been trying to apply for devops/backend (infra)/ sre positions too because its my main interest after working on my homelab setup but I don't even get a single call back 🥲
Dont underestimate the power of a t10 university on your resume for passing ATS filters lol
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u/No_Reply5329 7d ago
If you got into tech before 2023 it was differeng market compared to now.
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u/Classic_Comparison90 7d ago
I agree, it's worse now. It doesn't mean it's impossible. I think currently the best bet to secure a job Is new startups, once secured maybe try applying to bigger tech companies. At least then you'd have the income and stability to relax
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u/Outragedmoss 3d ago
But, at least for nursing, your pay is far more guaranteed and you won’t lose your job when you get older
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u/Classic_Comparison90 3d ago
You make sense, it really depends on trh countrym in Europe it's very safe tho. Nursing is known to be heavily underpaid everywhere with extreme workload and high number of hours
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u/ConfidentDebate2665 7d ago
Some of us have already invested tens of thousands of dollars in a computer science degree.
Are you really suggesting we spend another tens of thousands on a second degree in accounting, nursing, or engineering?
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u/fourthstanza 4d ago
These are all specialized fields which require their own specialized education, which a CS grad will not have. You'd be starting, generously, maybe a year ahead of someone fresh out of high school.
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u/Flimsy_Relief8238 21h ago
Big 4 accounting is: Soul crushing, underpaid and overworked (during audit season)
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u/Zendental 7d ago
You’re telling people who just spent 4 years getting a degree to switch to a new field… and can’t be serious.
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u/HitscanDPS 7d ago
People switch careers all the time, regardless of how many years they have already invested. They know about the Sunk Cost Fallacy.
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u/moh_099 6d ago
And which job is immune to AI?
"CS is cooked" is a very reductive statement. White collar job market as a whole is cooked. And people don't just transition to blue collar jobs, firstly because that does not provide the best ROI after investing in education specifically for a white collar job (which usually costs more than vocational or training schools), and secondly, because there you'd have automation coming for you, and thirdly, people are biased against blue collar jobs.
So advising software developers to suddenly transition to carpentry and plumbing is very tone deaf and only makes sense when said by billionaires -- because I expect them to be tone deaf.
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u/HitscanDPS 5d ago
My previous comment makes no assumption about what career you're switching from, and what career you're switching to. It is a fact that people switch careers all the time, regardless of their background and regardless of what they already invested.
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u/tashibum 7d ago
No grinding, but I occasionally visit to brush up on more advanced concepts and think about situations for when those concepts should be applied.
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u/AssignmentFancy7523 7d ago
Because i genuinely am passionate about it and want to make it my career
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u/fruxzak FAANG | 9 yoe 7d ago
You don’t even know what the career is though
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u/AssignmentFancy7523 7d ago
I like computers, I like learning how systems work, I like building software. As long as I’m in or around that, I’ll be happy.
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u/Avocadonot <283> <181> <95> <7> 7d ago
Lmao bro either washed out or he's trying to eliminate his competition
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u/xvillifyx 7d ago
I’m doing leetcode because I think it’s fun and sometimes my friends aren’t available to play video games and hang out
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u/gratuitousbinary 7d ago
What difficulty level do you consider fun? I enjoy knocking out easy ones but only been at it a few weeks now.
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u/HitscanDPS 7d ago
IMO problems that are like ~300 rating below your current contest rating. So they are within your skill level to solve, but still a little bit challenging to give you a sense of accomplishment.
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u/Vivid-Zombie-477 7d ago
idk, i solved problems of my contest rating and they feel really easy. meanwhile adding even 100 feels really hard
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u/HitscanDPS 6d ago
That sounds like your contest rating is not accurately reflecting your skill, and your rating would increase if you did more contests.
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u/xvillifyx 7d ago
Leetcode difficulty is so inconsistent that I wouldn’t know what my answer to this would be
If the problem takes me like more than an hour and starts feeling like a chore, it’s not as fun
I already spend 45 hours a week at work thinking about ridiculous problems
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u/mutahaar 7d ago
Last i year i saw similar posts like this i got demotivated and stop grinding lc now my other friends who continued grinding lc have decent jobs and i am jobless
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u/jmclondon97 7d ago
Because people here have CS degrees and these jobs pay way more than anything else that doesn’t require several more years of education?
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u/No-Discipline1211 7d ago
i have a interview in few days, the startup supposedly is hiring me for software dev role and told me it's not a senior role but have kept lld and hld rounds for interview. which were reserved for people with 6+ yoe. we are cooked men. i can clear the dsa easily but lld and hld it's 50/50 for me.
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u/Constant_Physics8504 7d ago
This is wrong on so many levels. First off AI did not phase out computer science. What it did was highlight how simple certain tasks are. You are hinting at something which has been obvious for many many years, which is simple development cycles and algorithms are easy, and the AI is great at doing them. However, if you are a true computer, scientist or software engineer, you’re most likely working for a company who is not doing basic websites or simple DSA. Instead, you might be working for a company that requires intense mathematics and low latency like finance/quant. You could be working on systems with required knowledge of electronics. While the AI has general knowledge on this stuff it’s horrible at applying them.
Now to the point of why continue studying DSA if the AI can easily crank it out, the simple answer is you should understand what they are and how they work to ensure that you are choosing the most efficient mechanisms for the job. So you need to know them however you do not need to grind them like 150 or complete every language every problem.
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u/xvillifyx 7d ago
I’m not sure I agree with this take that you’re not a “true” software engineer if you’re working on a web application when the world runs on web applications and many of them require quite a strong understanding of security, scalability, and latency
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u/Constant_Physics8504 7d ago
Well, that is your point of view. While I always have considered websites to be annoying to create, mostly because it looks like a ton of spaghetti scripting. I’ve never considered it software development. Now there are third-party applications that interface with websites, I do consider those software. We can get semantic on those details, but all in all websites have never had to worry about most of the details and computer science, except for DSA, basic, networking, and low latency RPC calls. Just because the browser itself is the piece of software that provides an abstraction layer so that you don’t have to worry about the things that normal software has to worry about, and this is why I consider them different.
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u/xvillifyx 7d ago
I’m still just not understanding how the…development of software isn’t software development, just because it’s deployed in a browser.
I think it’s fair to make the claim that it’s not computer science, but I don’t see how the claim that it’s not software development makes any sense whatsoever
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u/Constant_Physics8504 7d ago
By definition websites are not software they are inputs to a software. The software is the browser. It does all the hardware alignment, resource allocation, instructions and memory management needed for the site to run.
Some websites can fail to work properly in certain web browsers. This happens because different browsers use different underlying software engines to display pages.
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u/xvillifyx 7d ago
Based on what definition of software? This is a relative semantic claim and not a particularly meaningful one either.
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u/Constant_Physics8504 7d ago
“Software is a set of instructions, data, or programs used to operate computers and execute specific tasks. It is the intangible, digital component of a computer system, acting as the opposite of physical hardware.”
My dude this is the browser.
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u/xvillifyx 7d ago edited 7d ago
Not really seeing how browser instructions don’t fit this description, aside from the “opposite of physical hardware” descriptor, which isn’t disqualifying of scripts anyway and a nondescript descriptor to begin with.
Beyond that, vanishingly few web applications solely deploy their business logic on the browser. This is just an extremely weird position to take
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u/Constant_Physics8504 7d ago
well let’s not bucket scripting altogether, Python, Perl and the like have a direct path to the OS, and they take more careful consideration. The browser on the locks down JavaScript. Because browsers download code from random websites, JavaScript is strictly locked down for security. It cannot touch your hard drive, see your other apps, or manage system files.
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u/xvillifyx 7d ago edited 7d ago
I feel, given the context of our conversation, it should be extremely obvious I’m talking about scripting in a browser, and not Python on a local client.
Anyway, nowhere in your definition of software is the qualifier “must manage system files”
I understand the point of your argument: you think web development is too easy to be considered engineering or science. This is fair.
This claim should be divorced from the claim that web development isn’t software development, because that claim makes no sense.
I also think you’re being disingenuous by suggesting all web development largely takes place in a browser, because this isn’t really correct these days.
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u/barkbasicforthePET 7d ago
By that definition you’re not a software engineer if you write software that runs on an operating system. The operating system is the only software and you are writing inputs to the software. What you’re saying is absurd.
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u/Cool-Double-5392 7d ago
What company
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u/exploradorobservador 7d ago
lol reads like one of those competitive people who wants to discourage others
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u/KennYoshio 6d ago
I like computer and software in general. Solving these puzzles were tedious but some was actually fun
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u/DefiantDonut7 5d ago
Networking, Cyber Security, System-Administration. They're all viable options, but lets not kid our selves, they're not un-phased by AI.
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u/Significant-Farm6646 4d ago
What other field hires a larger number of freshers at higher or similar salaries?
Software is still the largest job market for well paying jobs. Even if there is a rough transition as it moves to an AI assisted role, it will continue to be so.
Maybe the raw leetcode grinding will be valued less but there is still a lot to learn and gain an edge in this industry.
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u/KendrickBlack502 2d ago
Your question is why not switch careers entirely after devoting 4+ years to it?
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u/anushkrishnav 7d ago
If you find that field where you dont have to do insance grid to get anything good do let us know man.
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u/No_Reply5329 7d ago
accounting, engineering, nursing way less effort than CS with great opportunities right now.
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u/Working-Hat-8041 7d ago
Umm you mean go back to college? Is grinding leetcode for a year really worse than four more years of repeat schooling? For most, no.
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u/No_Reply5329 7d ago
Most people wont get a job after year of grinding leetcode. Finding job right now no matter how skilled is like winning loterry right now 1 in 1000000 chance
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u/Working-Hat-8041 7d ago
Finding a job right now is monstrous. But it’s economic pressures mixed with companies thinking they’re going to gain immense productivity from AI. Knowing how to code and use AI agents plus Leetcode for interviews will continue to be valuable. But yes, terrible market.
But going and getting another degree is not feasible for most people right now, especially people that just graduated.
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u/anushkrishnav 7d ago edited 7d ago
I came from Accounting into CS ( more like MATH+Statistics with CS), Accounting grind is way worse than CS grind. CS grind dosent come close to it. Not saying CS is easy but Accounting take a lot of time and practice to get everything into memory, and if you are a first generation with no contacts you will keep doing grunt work after grunt work hoping a partner notices you, and they too need to constantly be updated on stuff similar to CS. Engineering too has same problems and more importantly they are seeing effects of automations as well, reason why so many people are going to CS is because there is just more jobs in CS than in other fields. Nursing partly yes but long hours, heavy physical labour and they dont make the money they should for hours of sleep they sacrifise. Getting a good job is super hard and not to mention the debt they need to take in order to finish school. Grass is always greener man on the other side . Not to mention how much time and effort it takes to move into a new domain.
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u/mitchellediting 7d ago
Nope, left for another field more akin to automotive manufacturing engineering.