LeetCode

So why exactly does this matter for Gen Z founders? Well, let's look at how you've been told to build a career.

Grind LeetCode.

Win the hackathon where the prompt is handed to you at 9am, close a ticket a senior engineer wrote, and get the grade on the assignment someone else designed.

Every one of those is a closed shape, and it's already repricing.

is a practice field.

The line I keep seeing is that comparing them head-to-head is like comparing GitHub to LeetCode.

It's blunt, but it lands.

Hugging face is where models and data sets live as versioned artifacts that plug into training and deployment pipelines.

So a lot of it didn't seem relevant.

But actually, I'm starting to realize that we've gone too far the other way now, that a lot of people never learn those things, or they only learn them to pass LeetCode to pass a job interview.

So they don't really learn them.

They learn the mechanics of repeating them and regurgitating them and recognizing that this problem on LeetCode requires you to build a tree.

But they haven't really learned what a tree is and why we did it and what problem it solves.

And part of the problem with that is they haven't then learned that, you know, this is actually the concept of divide and conquer.

I mean, people have warned me that my skills might atrophy and I'm like, okay.

How do I write a code? Have you opened LeetCode in the last six months? I don't know.

I don't think so.

I just love my job so much, basically.

But I'm like you, I'm concerned about whether my prefrontal cortex is atrophying into a prune.

I think it comes back.

The LeetCode EZs, you can get there.

But I'm scared that next year, it won't be so easy.

So if you think about when I'm reasoning, or well, when Chachupati reasons over text, it reasons with a very small number of tokens.

Whereas if I'm doing a LeetCode interview, let's say I'm trying to figure out some binary search problem, and I start talking through my solution, I'm like, okay, so what we need to do is we need to figure out whether we're left or right and blah, blah, blah.

The number of tokens I've expended to describe that is unbelievably high.

So your tool calling will be inefficient.

Like you said, like they have to be a best fit and we have to be a best fit for them, et cetera, et cetera.

But how do candidates feel about it? I assume, you know, some people learned LeetCode and grinded years away at LeetCode and you're still like, yeah, all that doesn't matter anymore versus some people who might be relieved like, oh, finally I can focus on the good parts of whatever.

Have you heard any feedback from the people who are trying to join C1 and went through this like very new sort of process where they get an API key and get an agent to like do their will?

Yeah.

But having said that, I do think we tried to set expectations.

It's generally been really positive.

Um, because I think it is also, I think people, I personally did not like the LeetCode era.

Like it never excited me and I never excited, was excited trying to give those interviews.