I opened up Leetcode and started chipping away at the problems in the “Hard” section. It took me days to solve some and I felt miserable. Self-doubt crept in, and I started to lose motivation. I hopped on 2 phone screens and failed both. It was humiliating and I felt like shit.
As in, the same very same tests your company now expects new candidates to "solve" (pretending they haven't seen it before) in about 30 minutes tops. In order to, you know, keep out the riff-raff.
When my mentor was going through MANAMANA interviews a several months back for senior/staff DS/MLE positions, he was getting mostly mediums and a handful of hards.
With a few exceptions, I generally can't solve hard leetcode problems. It never even occurred to me to feel bad about it! I've been a working programmer for 25 years, including many years at Microsoft and Facebook. I'm certain I've never encountered a problem at work that needed a 'hard' style solution, and if I hypothetically had, I don't even know how it would pass code review.
I've solved almost all of the easy and mediums, though.
My perspective of "hard" LC problems is that they are typically distributed over a system anyways, where the optimal parts make the whole. That, or they are domain-specific analogs, like complex solvers, or involve graduate graph theory, etc.
What is your perception? I haven't done LC in about a year and a half.
I recently changed jobs (also interviewed at FB, though I didn't do well) and none of the interview questions were at LeetCode hard level.
There was maybe one question that I'd say was objectively hard (because it was completely unexpected and blew my mind - fortunately I did it OK) - but I don't think practicing LeetCode hard level would've helped there anyway. And then several questions were barely above LeetCode easy level and I had a brain fart. (Should have practiced binary trees a bit more, dammit.)
IMHO LeetCode hard level is a waste of time, unless you know for sure that the company you're preparing for gives these questions.
Hard level are really rare in FAANG, based on my friend who recently went through Google interviews. More like easy/medium. It actually sounded fairly easy to me, he only prepped for a month without any prior leetcode experience. I think finance tend to ask the medium/hard questions more so.
As in, the same very same tests your company now expects new candidates to "solve" (pretending they haven't seen it before) in about 30 minutes tops. In order to, you know, keep out the riff-raff.