grinding leetcode to prep for interviews takes a lot more time. how can you have a CS degree and a career and have no personal projects? i graduated in CS with 4 programming projects done.
all the arguments you give are the same for leetcode prep. the difference is that if it is your own code that you walk through you need to prep a lot less. and that is good because in your situation you would not be able to grind hundreds of irrelevant problems in your spare time for each interview.
as far as your cottage industry argument… you can tell if someone did not write his own code and the system is being gamed right now anyway by people taking interviews for others and so on. and this thread shows people are medicating which is the worst.
> how can you have a CS degree and a career and have no personal projects?
Other people's lives differ from yours in ways that are difficult to imagine. Plenty of people have a career in programming without ever going to college. Just because one can't imagine it doesn't make it invalid, or even that it is one's business. If it isn't about their job performance, don't measure it.
> all the arguments you give are the same for leetcode prep.
An interesting point, but of course I wasn't defending leetcode interviews, I was responding to your assertion that people who have the requisite skills necessarily have free time, and the subtext that any time not spent working was available for more working.
all the arguments you give are the same for leetcode prep. the difference is that if it is your own code that you walk through you need to prep a lot less. and that is good because in your situation you would not be able to grind hundreds of irrelevant problems in your spare time for each interview.
as far as your cottage industry argument… you can tell if someone did not write his own code and the system is being gamed right now anyway by people taking interviews for others and so on. and this thread shows people are medicating which is the worst.