Please stop the coding challenges

I have literally 10 years of experience in Android development (starting with Java and transitioning to Kotlin around seven years ago). There are many topics in Java and Kotlin that are irrelevant to Android development, but I focus only on what I need. I quickly learn and build on new topics when required.

I’m speaking here as a developer who has done more than just bug fixes or UI tweaks. I’ve built apps that have served millions of users. I even have personal projects that currently serve 20–30k users daily, with over 1 million downloads and a 4.9-star rating from 41k reviews. Beyond Android, I have experience managing servers with Nginx, setting up SSL certificates, using Cloudflare, AWS, and Hetzner.

I’ve designed an app with users, posts, and likes, handling both the front-end and back-end using cloud functions and Firebase. From writing Firebase rules to encrypting everything, I understood and implemented it all within a few months. I’ve also written numerous web scrapers in Python for personal projects, which are still in use. While some backend concepts might seem basic, I believe knowing how the backend works is a huge advantage for an Android developer.

Despite all this experience, I recently failed to solve a "number of islands" problem in an interview and got rejected:

Given an m x n 2D binary grid representing a map of '1's (land) and '0's (water), return the number of islands. This left me feeling useless. It made me question whether I’m fit to be a software developer. I studied DSA in college, but now I struggle to recall or prepare for it. Does this mean I’m a poor developer? Does someone who grinds LeetCode just necessarily have better skills in general? Is this what companies want? Are they okay to spend money and time in training someone just grinds LeetCode for the purpose interviews. Does someone who does this just for interviews is likely to stay in same company?

I believe there must be a better way to evaluate candidates. It makes sense to test DSA in campus interviews, where students are fresh and studying it. But for experienced developers, especially for roles like Android development, DSA is rarely relevant to the job requirements.

I’m not saying I can’t practice and do DSA—I can. But it has never been a job requirement for me, and I doubt it ever will be for an Android developer or a similar role. If it’s ever truly needed, I’m confident that most experienced developers, including myself, can excel through research and applied knowledge.

#Kill-DSA

I kind of agree with you that in practice very few jobs actually require any implementation of textbook algorithms.

The weird thing is that while people keep complaining about the focus on algorithms in the interview context, it seems like nobody objects when it comes to the recommended CS education.

I think there is a deep dissonance when people strongly recommend learning data structures and algorithms as part of CS and software engineering curriculum, but then when employers actually ask about these in interviews there is strong pushback.

I personally tend to think the right balance is in the middle. At least, whatever is taught in a typical software engineering curriculum should be fair game for interview questions.

The “number of islands” problem could be something that comes up in a DSA assignment in college.

I don’t know whether not knowing how to code it up in an interview setting makes you a bad engineer, but those who still remember their college classes got ahead of you apparently.

I often argue and get downvoted in the discussions when I claim algorithms and advanced math isn’t really needed as a prerequisite in the software industry. It’s only when people get gatekept for forgetting things taught in their college classes that they complain. Imagine that.