How much Leetcode should you do before applying for a developer job?
Leetcode as a measure of engineering worthiness is a metric often maligned by engineers themselves, but many of the highest paying firms still take it into consideration. You'll need to spend some time on the coding platform if you want a job at the top paying firms in tech and finance, but how much time do you really need to spend?
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A recent study by computer science students and academics at North Carolina State University and the University of Virginia suggests that if you want to apply for a job at a major employer, you probably need to complete 300 Leetcode problems or more. Some employers will require more practice than others.
The study looked at the scores of over 300k public Leetcode profiles; on average, Goldman Sachs employees have completed 122 fewer problems than employees at Meta, and 156 fewer than employees at Google.
Goldman employees don't just do less Leetcode than tech firms; they do proportionally easier problems too. Only 11.9% of problems Goldman developers completed were ranked as hard, while 30.5% were ranked easy. At Google, those figures were 14% and 29.8% respectively.
Why is this the case? Banks tend to look for people with experience in specific technologies, as their development is more platform-focused, in a support capacity to other functions such as quant traders. Big Tech firms, conversely, look closer at coding quality during recruitment.
There are exceptions to the rule. Bloomberg engineers do more coding on average than Meta's, while NVIDIA engineers do less than Goldman. In NVIDIA's case, employees also work on a highly specialized tech stack. This is probably why NVIDIA ranks highest for problems solved in C++.
Goldman developers may feel a bit more secure, then, about recent developments in AI and the notion that coding prowess isn't as important as it used to be. Data analyst Tim Shelton previously went viral for solving 633 problems in 24 hours using AI; he called the platform 'dumb and arbitrary' as a means of measuring value.
Doing a lot of Leetcode is no guarantee of a job offer, and not doing it doesn't mean you're screwed. On jobs forum Blind, one verified Google employee said they got offers from Meta, Amazon and their current employer despite solving just 103 problems. Another Google engineer that solved over 1,300 Leetcode problems said they do it not for interviews, but for the "quick dopamine hit" of finding a solution.
For engineers in finance, working smarter-not-harder seems to be the play. You can check out our other articles on popular questions asked by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, including one hard question that multiple have cited coming up in interviews.
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