Am I Missing Out Something By Not Doing Competitive Programming ?

If you are just starting with college or already in college and thinking about preparing for interviews with tech companies, you might have come across this confusion about whether to do Competitive Programming or not. Many people say that grinding Leetcode is enough to prepare for interviews, so why spend time doing something so hard as Competitive Programming ? It is important to understand that not everyone is in a position to do Competitive Programming. This post will explore the world of Competitive Programming in detail and help you understand if you should do it or not.

If you are new to this term Competitive Programming, there are platforms like Codechef, Topcoder and Codeforces where you can participate in time bound contests to solve these DSA problems. They also open up their past contest problems to solve as for practice. Competitive Programming is different from your usual Leetcode as every contest brings up a new set of problems so you cannot just learn the solution of past contests to solve the new problems. You need to be able to come up with the solution yourself. This makes Competitive Programming much harder compared to Leetcode. Problems are classified majorly into three categories: Easy, Medium & Hard. The hard problems are really hard and usually solved by world class coders. If you are able to solve just the Easy and Medium ones, you are already at expert level in the DSA world.

It should be very clear by now that Competitive Programming is much harder compared to doing Leetcode. So why do Competitive Programming at all ? One very good answer to tis question is if you can do Competitive Programming like a pro, the interviews for any tech company out there will be very easy for you. By doing Competitive Programming, you are practising tougher questions compared to the questions asked in the interviews of companies like Google. It is a slow but sure shot path to get into the best tech companies of the world. I am not making this up, I was myself a competitive coder on Codechef, so I know first hand how it helped me crack interviews of big tech companies.

Now the most important question, should you be doing Competitive Programming or not ? Let us understand how much time you need to invest if you need to become a pro competitive coder. On average, you should be able to give 2-3 hours daily for the next 2 years to be able to reach an expert level of programming. So if you are not in a position to spend this much time, you should not be doing Competitive Programming. So if you are in a job, it might not be practically possible for this kind of commitment. But if you are a 1st or 2nd year college student, you have more than enough time to take up Competitive Programming. So make a decision based on how much time you can actually commit. If you cannot commit this much of time, I would suggest you to practise interview problems on platforms like Leetcode.

Competitive Programming is an activity which takes super slow to show results. But the small efforts that you put everyday compound over time. No company will feel out of reach as you will be a pro coder with expert knowledge of Data Structures & Algorithms.