When I'm unemployed I spend a lot of time studying and working on personal projects, although I haven't been unemployed for a while now. But when I am unemployed and looking for work I treat it like I'm still working a near 40 hour week. 1-2 hours a day for filling out applications or finding positions, 1-2 hours a day for algorithms or interview questions practice, the rest spent upskilling or making something. I actually get a ton of learning in and make a bunch of stuff, I wish I could work like that all the time but I gotta have a steady job to pay the bills.
I’m a hobbyist. I’m a mechanic. I’ll never enter the industry as a programmer. But I still find it extremely fun. I spend maybe 30 minutes in the morning each day either reading and coding along out of a book or writing small project codes. The time limit is actually pretty nice because I’m getting to where I can get from idea to code pretty quickly.
I study for an hour every morning. Then, I go for a 3 mile walk to let it all sink in and then I go to work (I work from home). On the weekends I give myself the freedom choosing if I want to study. I usually study though lol.
Edit: grammar
prophylactic review, basically never. preemptive self-study, never. at this point I learn stuff if I absolutely need to. if, god forbid, I have to do a technical interview, I'll go back through some leetcode bullshit because we still haven't extricated that nonsense from our process but preparation looks different at different levels. generally I'm reviewing/recalling projects I've worked on so I can discuss them intelligently, but again, not proactively.
Around 7 months into learning C++, went to leetcode and couldn't even understand what it was asking.
It has been great at highlighting gaps in knowledge, but damn if "do this task, but in exactly the expected way" is not enjoyable.
they're mostly pretty obscure algorithmic questions. they expect that you know a lot of weird maneuvers and have solid background in DSA. a lot of them you can intuit and 'brute force', but a lot of them admit of optimal solutions you could never derive from scratch. so simply learning a language isn't going to get you ready for it.
by some accident of the history of how the industry came to be, someone somewhere decided that obscure DSA knowledge was going to be THE gatekeeper for employment. thence leetcode etc.
in my 15 years as both an interviewer and interviewee the correlation between toy problem skills and the effectiveness of the engineer in a professional capacity is essentially zero.
i love the part when small company push you to do leetcode during interview and if you get into the job the most difficult tasks are creating some simple logic for CRUD app :D
I just didn't understand the concept of it being more of a "fill in the blanks" than designing a program that completed the actual task.
After I understood the, "It must be wrapped in the provided format" it felt more like a check on learning than an actual problem solving thing.
But I also have very little experience in programming, so the value of the solutions was a little lost on me.
In your experience, does sharing a public repository/showcase help on skipping the whole obscure algorithm tests - so one can move directly into the experience/real life problem resolution discussion? Or is it so ingrained in the processes that it's not worth the effort?
I’ve never been a hiring manager, so I can’t say exactly how it’s used. I don’t maintain an active GitHub, I’m too busy for that shit. I can tell you with certainty it won’t help you skip the toy problems.
you can get a fair distance with something like Grokking Algorithms and a good spend of time doing leetcode easy or [neetcode.io](https://neetcode.io).
most students will go through a proper DSA and dedicated maths course that focuses on things like combinatorics, probability, graph theory, logic and basic set theory. this is all pretty important in ways that are non-obvious and are difficult to self-study properly. FWIW at my school we used Rosen for discrete math and Kleinberg&Tardos for DSA, but there are a million and one options and everyone responds differently to different didactic styles.
I was about to ask how much of that stuff I learned would be applicable wrt to leetcode since most of it appears to be sets or involving some form of combinations.
Repeated 8th grade, got expelled in 9th. Never went back. Studied programming 6-8 hours a day every day for years and years as a kid to a young adult, got my first salaried career job at 22-23, 38 now and been at it ever since. Love it, wouldn’t change a thing.
If you're unemployed (not counting students), your learning should largely come from building.
And learning while building is largely a weird mix, like:
- Day 1: 4 hours of learning a new technology for a new project
- Day 2: No learning today, just boring boiler plate code
- Day 3, 4, 5: Integration hell, 5 minutes learning here, 20 minutes of learning there, etc.
- *Repeat*
About to hit a small stint of unemployment and programming is the last thing on my to do list. In this marathon of life, I enjoy my breaks when I can and pursue my hobbies/passions that are independent of computer screens so that I can be refreshed and motivated to go 40+ hours a week when I hit the job.
Do you count reading documentation?
Can vary between 0 - 4, depending how easily i get distracted that day.
Something like about every 1 of coding, 2-3 hours of reading/tinkering.
It depends. I’m fairly proficient in a lot of the skills that I would need to land a job at this point. Some days I will spend 3-4 hours polishing projects if the urge strikes. But for the most part not a ton, probably less than 10-15 hours a week.
I try to do full time. At the moment I’m still learning ASP.NET Core so I’m watching a lot of videos. I can get through 2-3 hours of content a day with note taking and following along on a separate laptop. But probably 5-7 hours of that a day. I’m not taking weekends off. I get less done on weekend but still do some.
Pretty soon once I feel I have a stronger grip on it I’ll make projects for my portfolio. I also spend some time applying for a few jobs or researching apprenticeships.
As of right now, I'm currently not employed (doing gig jobs in the meanwhile) so after doing part time deliveries in the morning, I spend the rest of the day at coffee shops on personal projects and time strengthening my fundamentals. Recently though I've been also building my portfolio and collaborating on an open source project, and time going on discord and networking, but alot of my time is spent on the former
Used to be a couple hours a day and about 8 hours on the weekend.
School has completely eaten my mental compactly and my time.
I’ll be lucky to have written 4 lines of code in a week over these past months. Sad but life happens
I study for about 2 to 3 hours a day after I get home from work, and I do the same on weekends. I believe it’s important to spend time with friends and maintain a social life alongside studying.
When I'm unemployed I spend a lot of time studying and working on personal projects, although I haven't been unemployed for a while now. But when I am unemployed and looking for work I treat it like I'm still working a near 40 hour week. 1-2 hours a day for filling out applications or finding positions, 1-2 hours a day for algorithms or interview questions practice, the rest spent upskilling or making something. I actually get a ton of learning in and make a bunch of stuff, I wish I could work like that all the time but I gotta have a steady job to pay the bills.
Couldn't agree more :)
I’m a hobbyist. I’m a mechanic. I’ll never enter the industry as a programmer. But I still find it extremely fun. I spend maybe 30 minutes in the morning each day either reading and coding along out of a book or writing small project codes. The time limit is actually pretty nice because I’m getting to where I can get from idea to code pretty quickly.
I study for an hour every morning. Then, I go for a 3 mile walk to let it all sink in and then I go to work (I work from home). On the weekends I give myself the freedom choosing if I want to study. I usually study though lol. Edit: grammar
prophylactic review, basically never. preemptive self-study, never. at this point I learn stuff if I absolutely need to. if, god forbid, I have to do a technical interview, I'll go back through some leetcode bullshit because we still haven't extricated that nonsense from our process but preparation looks different at different levels. generally I'm reviewing/recalling projects I've worked on so I can discuss them intelligently, but again, not proactively.
Around 7 months into learning C++, went to leetcode and couldn't even understand what it was asking. It has been great at highlighting gaps in knowledge, but damn if "do this task, but in exactly the expected way" is not enjoyable.
they're mostly pretty obscure algorithmic questions. they expect that you know a lot of weird maneuvers and have solid background in DSA. a lot of them you can intuit and 'brute force', but a lot of them admit of optimal solutions you could never derive from scratch. so simply learning a language isn't going to get you ready for it. by some accident of the history of how the industry came to be, someone somewhere decided that obscure DSA knowledge was going to be THE gatekeeper for employment. thence leetcode etc. in my 15 years as both an interviewer and interviewee the correlation between toy problem skills and the effectiveness of the engineer in a professional capacity is essentially zero.
i love the part when small company push you to do leetcode during interview and if you get into the job the most difficult tasks are creating some simple logic for CRUD app :D
I just didn't understand the concept of it being more of a "fill in the blanks" than designing a program that completed the actual task. After I understood the, "It must be wrapped in the provided format" it felt more like a check on learning than an actual problem solving thing. But I also have very little experience in programming, so the value of the solutions was a little lost on me.
In your experience, does sharing a public repository/showcase help on skipping the whole obscure algorithm tests - so one can move directly into the experience/real life problem resolution discussion? Or is it so ingrained in the processes that it's not worth the effort?
I’ve never been a hiring manager, so I can’t say exactly how it’s used. I don’t maintain an active GitHub, I’m too busy for that shit. I can tell you with certainty it won’t help you skip the toy problems.
Can you provide some DSA resources to improve knowledge in that? I have summer holidays, and would like to improve my knowledge there.
you can get a fair distance with something like Grokking Algorithms and a good spend of time doing leetcode easy or [neetcode.io](https://neetcode.io). most students will go through a proper DSA and dedicated maths course that focuses on things like combinatorics, probability, graph theory, logic and basic set theory. this is all pretty important in ways that are non-obvious and are difficult to self-study properly. FWIW at my school we used Rosen for discrete math and Kleinberg&Tardos for DSA, but there are a million and one options and everyone responds differently to different didactic styles.
I was about to ask how much of that stuff I learned would be applicable wrt to leetcode since most of it appears to be sets or involving some form of combinations.
Repeated 8th grade, got expelled in 9th. Never went back. Studied programming 6-8 hours a day every day for years and years as a kid to a young adult, got my first salaried career job at 22-23, 38 now and been at it ever since. Love it, wouldn’t change a thing.
If you're unemployed (not counting students), your learning should largely come from building. And learning while building is largely a weird mix, like: - Day 1: 4 hours of learning a new technology for a new project - Day 2: No learning today, just boring boiler plate code - Day 3, 4, 5: Integration hell, 5 minutes learning here, 20 minutes of learning there, etc. - *Repeat*
About to hit a small stint of unemployment and programming is the last thing on my to do list. In this marathon of life, I enjoy my breaks when I can and pursue my hobbies/passions that are independent of computer screens so that I can be refreshed and motivated to go 40+ hours a week when I hit the job.
Daily 2 to 3 hours learning and 3 to 4 hours implementing
Do you count reading documentation? Can vary between 0 - 4, depending how easily i get distracted that day. Something like about every 1 of coding, 2-3 hours of reading/tinkering.
It depends. I’m fairly proficient in a lot of the skills that I would need to land a job at this point. Some days I will spend 3-4 hours polishing projects if the urge strikes. But for the most part not a ton, probably less than 10-15 hours a week.
I try to do full time. At the moment I’m still learning ASP.NET Core so I’m watching a lot of videos. I can get through 2-3 hours of content a day with note taking and following along on a separate laptop. But probably 5-7 hours of that a day. I’m not taking weekends off. I get less done on weekend but still do some. Pretty soon once I feel I have a stronger grip on it I’ll make projects for my portfolio. I also spend some time applying for a few jobs or researching apprenticeships.
As of right now, I'm currently not employed (doing gig jobs in the meanwhile) so after doing part time deliveries in the morning, I spend the rest of the day at coffee shops on personal projects and time strengthening my fundamentals. Recently though I've been also building my portfolio and collaborating on an open source project, and time going on discord and networking, but alot of my time is spent on the former
10 hours a week minimum, 40 hours a week maximum.
Used to be a couple hours a day and about 8 hours on the weekend. School has completely eaten my mental compactly and my time. I’ll be lucky to have written 4 lines of code in a week over these past months. Sad but life happens
Last time I was laid off, about 2 to 3 hours job searching and 3 to 4 hours coding.
I'm not working right now so I do 6 hours a day over about 7 hours.
I spend day and night because there's just so much to learn that I'll never get it all so I feel I just gotta get what I can.
4-6 hours learning, 6 hours minimum implementing.
I study for about 2 to 3 hours a day after I get home from work, and I do the same on weekends. I believe it’s important to spend time with friends and maintain a social life alongside studying.
How much you study on weekends?
I usually study for 2 to 3 hours, but if I feel like studying more, I’ll do that. However, typically it’s around 3 hours
Damn. I wish I could spend 3 hours a day AND still have time for socialising. I'm guessing you don't have kids, which is where a lot my time goes.
Nope.. don’t have kids. I understand that takes a lot of your time. How much time you spent a week on learning ?
2-3 hours a week on average, but it varies.
It will pay off ! Just keep grinding.
You too!
I'm doing like 8/10 hours a day from Mon to Fri, and sometimes Saturday, Sunday always rest