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Let me start with a confession: I once wrote a Python script that auto-submitted Leetcode solutions every 12 hours to boost my profile’s "streak." Why? Because during campus placements, an HR manager from a well-known IT services company told me,  "We don’t care if you’ve built projects. If you can’t solve two medium-difficulty problems in 30 minutes, we’ll take the candidate who can." This isn’t an outlier-it’s the reality for 80% of India’s engineering graduates. Let’s dissect why this system is failing everyone and how you can survive it without losing your sanity. The Leetcode Industrial Complex: How We Got Here Most tier 2-3 companies use coding tests as a  filter , not an assessment. Here’s why: 1.        Lazy Hiring Practices : It’s cheaper to auto-reject 1,000 candidates via a HackerRank test than to pay HR teams to review portfolios. 2.       Grade Inflation Paranoia : With 1.5 million engineers graduating yearly,...

  I've gotten back into the DSA world recently, which I have to say that I really loathe. Although coding is one of my favorite hobbies and I'm pursuing what I love, I can't really say that I'm a fan of competitive coding at all. So I still gathered all of my courage to start competitive coding in python for technical rounds in interviews, I did a few! But the day of the interview, 3 hours before the exam, my college placement cell dropped the bomb, "The only programming languages allowed for the test are: Java, C++ or C". And not just any version, one of the old crusty versions that they chose very specifically. I had some experience programming with all of them throughout the duration of my college-time, but after I shifted to programming professionally in python, I lost my touch. I sat in the interview hall, and wasted 45 minutes trying to get the Java syntax right, barely solving 50% of 3 questions each. Sad, really. SO, I plan to fix all of that. And this...