Students debating the LeetCode grind
A spike of posts captures growing anxiety: students are questioning multi-hour daily LeetCode sessions as AI coding tools and a tough jobs market change the calculus — some seniors are struggling despite intense grinding. The thread frames the debate as practical (time vs. ROI) and existential (what skills actually signal value) noted.
Community threads on Reddit, Levels.fyi and Hacker News have re-ignited criticism of the “multi-hour daily LeetCode” routine, with posts explicitly questioning its payoff for 2024–25 graduates. (redditmedia.com) Large language models and copilots now solve a large share of algorithmic problems in benchmarks—GPT-family models hit roughly 89% on easy, ~71% on medium and ~40% on hard problems in one multi-language study, and several papers benchmark GitHub Copilot across thousands of LeetCode problems. (spectrum.ieee.org) The hiring backdrop has tightened: Indeed’s Hiring Lab marked a continuing tech hiring freeze into mid‑2025 and independent trackers show roughly 127,000 U.S. tech layoffs in 2025, while software-engineer job postings fell to a five‑year low versus the mid‑2022 peak. (hiringlab.org) First‑hand reports and retrospectives tell a pattern many seniors hit—engineers who logged hundreds of LeetCode problems still report failing onsite loops or getting no interviews, and prep guides and platforms have amplified stories of “847 problems solved, still bombed Google onsite.” (dev.to) Recruiters and some engineering teams are shifting evaluation signals toward repo-based tasks, take‑home projects and system-design chops rather than pure puzzle speed, with industry commentaries and hiring‑best‑practice pieces explicitly calling out repo or project assessments as alternatives. (dev.to) Market signals now favor senior and product‑impact evidence—reports show senior roles make up a growing share of open listings and Copilot/Coding‑assistant studies report measurable productivity lifts (task reductions up to ~30–50% in some measures), changing what hiring committees prize. (underdog.io)
