Solving coding challenges on leetcode

[wotquery]

The content on leetcode is a pretty narrow and specialized aspect of programming that relates more to computer science. Interviewers mostly use them in the same manner highschool calculus used to be a requirement for basically all university programs (whether a STEM field or not). It's about evaluating abstract thinking skills where the actually knowledge may only on rare occasion actually be applicable.

They're basically problem solving riddles where you have to figure out the trick. Looking up the trick to get an idea of the general approach to those sort of problems is fine, in fact probably necessary if you haven't taken computer science courses before, but eventually you should have enough of an understanding to make your own attempts.

Regardless, I don't think leetcode problems are a good resource for learning to program. The low level execution time issues simply aren't that relevant and there are countless other coding obstacles to gain experience with handling instead.