Jump to level 2

okay i got a little scared off of applying to jobs and like totally talked myself down

but y’know i can’t avoid it forever & if i actually want a reasonable salary i shouldn’t just coast onto a random postdoc / research-y position

also plenty of other people don’t really have the luxury of chillaxing and wallowing in self-pity so y’know chin up or something, and i’m sure i’ll actually just feel much better actually doing something about something

anyway ok so i’m still mixed feelings about paying to study for technical interviews even if in theory it should be worth the money / a worthwhile investment vs. eating like 5 pizzas or something

just feels weird when there’s plenty of resources online, and i know that i have a low success rate of sticking with online things anyway

anyway, so if i use leetcode.com (arbitrarily) and go to problems, they have study plans, unfortunately these are a little gated, so i’ll instead copy them & go to them individually (since there is a full list, and a decent chunk of them are just listed in the freely accessible problems section)

This study plan is for those who want to prepare for technical interviews but are uncertain which problems they should focus on. The problems have been carefully curated so that levels 1 and 2 will guide beginner and intermediate users through problems that cover the data structures and algorithms necessary to succeed in interviews with most mid-tier companies. While level 3 provides material to help users whose targets are top-tier companies.

https://leetcode.com/study-plan/leetcode-75

Maybe a bit sketch, but since this doesn’t have the actual content of the questions…. So in order that’s

Level 1 – 15 days (15 days)

Problem ID	Topic
1480	Prefix Sum
724
205	String
392
21	Linked List
206
876
142
121	Greedy
409
589	Tree
102
704	Binary Search
278
98	Binary Search Tree
235
733	Graph/BFS/DFS
200
509	Dynamic Programming
70
746
62
438	Sliding Window / Two Pointer
424
1	Hashmap
299
844	Stack
394
1046	Heap
692

https://leetcode.com/problemset/all/

https://leetcode.com/problemset/all/?search=

Level 2 (25 days)

Problem ID	Topic	Date Start/Done
202	Implementation/Simulation	done
54		read
1706		skip
14	String	done
43		skip, wat
19	LinkedList	done
234		done 4.26
328	LinkedList	done 4.27
148		done 4.28 (need redo)
2131	Greedy	done 5.11 (need redo)
621		done 5.14 (need redo)
226	Tree
110
543	Tree
437
74	BinarySearch
33
108	BinarySearchTree
230
173
994	Graph/BFS/DFS
417
210	Graph/BFS/DFS
815
198	DynamicProgramming
322
416	DynamicProgramming
152
3	SlidingWindow/TwoPointer
16
76
100	Tree
101
199
232	Design
155
208
57	Interval
56
735	Stack
227
547	UnionFind
947
39	BruteForce/Backtracking
46

ugh honestly i lost interest so fast, i can only retain interest in reversing strings for so long, i’d much rather be like … doing fun cool projects … T____T but if it’s for the $$$ well it’s not the worst thing to have to do for the $$$ i guess

update 21 April 2023:

Okay, their site design is a little obnoxious sadly (but they are giving me resources for free sooo beggars/choosers)

I was having issue typing in the class “pt-0.5” but fortunately Firefox has a “copy CSS selector” which showed me I can use backslashes to escape the “.” in the class name.

using the stylus extension for firefox (it’s a recommended plugin so I felt somewhat better about installing this plugin) we can select the classes and set them to “display:none” in order to hide them.

div.css-h5fkc8 {
    display: none; /* list of study plans */
}
div.-mr-2 {
    display: none; /* links to weekly contests */
}
div.mt-4.pt-0\.5:nth-child(3){ /* list of companies */
    display: none;
}

yea ok it’s good to split these into diary / not diary since only half my blog posts are about technical things anymore

i’m here to chronicle some issues i never thought about. they suddenly coalesced over the last few months

i’ve always been consciously against the idea of a biological clock as causing semi-sexist complications (in terms of employer discrimination, career ambitions, etc.), kind of allergic to the concept actually

i mean wow way to give me FOMO anxiety BBC, why didn’t I hear about this when I was 20

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220603-why-women-have-to-sprint-into-leadership-positions

There is immense pressure for women to reach a certain level of career and financial success before becoming parents, says Karin Kimbrough, Chief Economist at LinkedIn, who conducted the research into the 10-year window to leadership.

Kimbrough calls this process a “sprint” to leadership, meaning that women who don’t scale the leadership ladder very quickly are less likely to make it to the top at all. This might mean they end up overworking or making enormous personal sacrifices in order to ascend to C-suite level during this crucial decade. Much of this urgency to sprint – and the exhausting overwork it involves – stems from women needing to make sure their careers don’t sink once they begin families.

They are racing the clock against the so-called motherhood penalty. In this phenomenon, women find their careers stalling in areas such as promotion and pay once their children are born (while, conversely, men’s careers accelerate after becoming fathers). This effect, as well as the enormous burden of caregiving responsibilities that women take on, is well documented (and similarly affects other types of caregivers, like looking after ageing parents, says Kimbrough).

Katie Bishop, for BBC

but through conversations (maybe 2 or 3 a year) i’ve started to realize things

• parents don’t stay spry forever, and it’s nice if they’re lively enough to help care for kids (b/c they’re a lot of work, and that reduces the career impact)

this is the result of talking to friend who consciously wanted her kid to know their grandparents are full independent adults, and be able to get to know their grandparents as adults also

+ reflecting that yea, my relationship with my parents is vastly different at 30 than at 20. my grandparents all died relatively young, and I wish I’d gotten to know them a bit more when they were healthy.

+ also staying with an older person, who I think even 5 years ago was really spry and independent, but is now almost housebound

• my other recent realization, it can take a while to get pregnant even. apparently on average it can take 6 months

I mean like this is so terrible from a project management / timeline perspective lol.

(Of course there is fostering, adopting, surrogacy, etc. Though I know relatively little about these. Other interesting rabbit holes — single dads by choice — see appendix.)

• then i looked up more details… you’re supposed to wait (according to science) between 1.5 to 2 years after giving birth before starting to try to have another kid

all this starts to add up!

• also, if i want to wait to run for senate until after my kids are off to college, i don’t want to be another geriatric geezer in congress 0:

anyhow, basically it was the combination of spacing (interpregnancy interval) + delay (time to actually get pregnant) which was like … that’s an extra 2-3 years on top of my timeline estimate 0: 0: 0:

anyhow yea not very technical but just stuff i never thought about — there’s a lifespan clock separate from fertility clock (which! btw! exists for guys too!)

i wonder if i’ll look back in 30 years and laugh at the “geriatric geezer” comment haha

appendix – single fathers by choice

Recently i learned there are also single fathers by choice, but only very few studies on them. Many studies are on gay dads having surrogate children (often in Israel — apparently the government / religion / culture really emphasizes having kids o__o — but it’s complicated because (according to the quotes in the papers) the conservative government also doesn’t really approve of LGBT. So the dads almost viewed it as an empowering act to have surrogate families). But far fewer on *single* dads by choice.

• https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Social-Experiences-of-Single-Gay-Fathers-in-An-Tsfati-Segal%E2%80%90Engelchin/8405f0b875742b805de49aa91292638385c4293f
• https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Children-of-Single-Fathers-Created-by-Surrogacy%3A-Pereira/ee815c5b824b37e96bc2f42088a66aa709e6dff9
• https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jan/29/i-always-wanted-to-be-a-dad-the-rise-of-single-fathers-by-choice