u/PLTCHK

Back then I have never been rejected about my recruiter screens. I researched about every company’s products and connect to the products they are building. I shared about the projects I’ve done and the impact I’ve made (e.g., ownerships, app I ran the entire cycle from collecting reqs system design to implementation to testing, performance improvement in %, developers I mentored, etc.) I don’t even stand a chance on technical rounds and I failed in more than 50% of the recruiter screenings out of 10 I applied, quite streaky now as well. I never stuttered at all and I communicate well. I never lied about my experience as well.

I am mainly targeting intermediate-senior dev roles, 5-6 years of experience. Is this the norm? Unless the candidates I’m against are all public speakers and drilled recruiter screens rigorously. Back then I didn’t get rejected close to that many times… in non-technical recruiter screening rounds…

1. I performed very bad academically - got 38/42 grade 1, got below avg score in IB (29/42) close to IB diploma, and almost got kicked out of college
2. I was usually clueless in computer science class/group assignments, got carried usually
3. I took an IQ test recently in a job interview and that confirmed it, not being moved forward with that
4. I am just slow-paced in real life as well, slow wit in solving daily problems sometimes
5. In every escape rooms with different buddies I pretty much just scratch corners looking for irrelevant bits, never solved a password lock myself, never solved a puzzle
6. I do have passion in maths, but I wasn't quite click-able with new concepts, got kicked out of maths high level class in IB back then
7. Understanding algorithmic edge cases and concepts take me like.. hours, sometimes i have to be walked through thoroughly before fully understanding it fully
8. As a kid I just didn't ask enough questions like those ppl who have a higher tendency of higher IQ. I had a lack of curiosity in a bunch of things, and one of my parents told me multiple times to use my brain

Now, I am trying out competitive programming at Leetcode. Was on-and-off for years for that one, and getting very consistent from then on. From when I first started till now, I did like approximately 800 problems so far. I am very methodical with my learning approach - Spreadsheet, capturing learnings from every bit of my struggles, sitting with an algorithmic problem for hours till I understood every bit of it plus how to derive those. Ppl who have done 10 contests and much would have 1850 ratings, while I am only sitting at ~1700. So now, that got me questioning - ppl yep they do appreciate hardwork, but I do see my rate of learning is like slow-as-snail-speed no matter how I optimized my learning with spreadsheet capture all my learnings for example, so I can't really think of anything else aside from my IQ/intelligence given quite some datapoints as of what I stated above.

As title

It’s a shame one of the companies asked me to do a Criteria IQ puzzle + personality test as screening round for a full-stack engineer role, and then I finished ~39/50 of it given 15 minutes, probably failed a bunch as a lot of them involved calculating raw division and I forgot how to manually do division.

After a week there’s no hearing back from it, and I suppose I can confirm that I got either average IQ or below, which sucks knowing that having avg/low IQ can gate me from some dev jobs.

It sucks because my work does not develop any AI-relevant skills, and also I am only allowed to use Intranet, and my company's machine doesn't have ClaudeCode or any AI installed (and very limited exposure to AI). Now when I browse postings it seems like a ton of dev jobs have requirements like:

• Fluent with AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Gemini, or similar)—you've integrated them in actual workflows, not just experimented.

Like, I have not even used them at work, and meanwhile I am competing with devs who are lucky enough to have the opportunity to throw hundreds and thousands of tokens around to production-ready projects. So, how to even land a gig now without an opportunity to build such experience? I suppose personal project would not be counted as 'actual workflows'?

I feel like idk, perhaps intermediate+/senior full-stackdev interview prep is just very... abundant. Setting aside cultural fit and behavioral rounds, there's DSA, system design, ofc your language of choice for example python (decorators, multiprocessing vs multithreading), React redux, etc., then there's db+SQL queries, DOM tree/virtual DOM, network security (https/tls cert), DevOps knowledge of microservices Docker, AWS, and then there's AI, LLD... and i feel like the software industry to expect me to be good at all these. Thoughts?

Every time I stumble on a greedy observation question variant, it's just novel with a different observational pattern shape as if each greedy problem got its own pattern. Of course I learn, and I keep in mind of those shapes, observations to look for and patterns appearing for every next greedy I encountered. Aside from doing more, do you like drill your thinking process, or drill something else?

Q3 I was cooked, can't think of a clean pattern for those 0s and 1s. Doesn't look li transporting 0 or 1 or sth similar, greedy-flipping doesn't seem like would work either. Breaking it down to pairs would lead to exponential possibilities. Looks like hell. Skip.

Q4 looks simpler than Q3, got to 3D DP but somehow but then I conflated the state of taking i1 and i2 at a certain target t (should only be taking one). Thought of splitting t into two strings as well for each str s1 and s2 to run their own 2D DPs but then that'd be simply backtracking t and TLE probs.

gg 2/4 gang.

Running a solution took 30 seconds

Submitting a solution took 30 seconds

Loading a question took a minute...

seriously...

Do you actually manage to derive every questions at least with hints/understanding of logic from page/solutions tab/LLM before daily question streak cutoff time without copy-pasting? What you do if there's this actual hard question, and you are close to the cutoff time and still cannot come up with solution?

Leetcode's usually down at least 1-2 times per months nowadays, this is unacceptable in UX perspective. Your system design team needs a revamp.

Is anyone experiencing the same slowness when running code/loading

How do you guys deal with that? I find losing from winning positions incredibly frustrating, opponent’s probably having a really good time from that comeback.