Five years away from CS. Where to start again? Especially for Leetcode interviews
Posted by Longjumping_Tap7939@reddit | learnprogramming | View on Reddit | 8 comments
I have a degree in CS, but due to personal reasons worked in IT and took a hiatus from coding or grinding for the past five years.
How do I start again? I don’t remember much of DSA anymore. I want to get a second shot at restarting my career in software.
But, I am so overwhelmed by the amount of options that I am lost in a flood of resources vs having a good flowchart to follow and actually start.
I have the time to dedicate to it daily, and my employer is fine with me taking a couple of my work hours to work on my skills.
Thank you for any help.
KwyjiboTheGringo@reddit
First off, expect to stay at your IT job for a while. Work toward your career pivot, and plan for unexpected layoffs, but know that it's going to take time to make the switch.
Secondly, start building. Just start with anything, do it from scratch, and forget AI even exists for a while. Don't even worry about making portfolio-worthy applications, you just need to start building.
Don't get hung up on this. Those changes are meaningless for our day-to-day, and they are very superficial. Code generation gets you nothing but a slight increase in performance by handling boiler plate code. GPTs are great at explaining concepts and documentation, but they are double-edge sword since they also confidently make shit up, and they don't tell you anything that isn't already out there in documentation and online discussions(with actual nuance).
You haven't missed much. The AI boom is mostly hype at this point. It's not even as revolutionary as the compiler, or even the LSP when it comes to the actual code-writing part. It's great for other things though, but you have to be very careful with it.
Zulban@reddit
How about this (I wrote it): Build Something Real
KwyjiboTheGringo@reddit
I agree to an extent, but OP just needs to build anything at this point. And leetcode grinding sucks, but if you can't do a binary search, walk a tree, or implement a sliding window algo, and you can't explain the time and space complexity of such solutions, then you've just seriously limited yourself to jobs that don't do basic whiteboarding. I'm not saying being a leetcode master is necessary, but having a strong grasp on the basics that are like 90% likely to be part of any whiteboarding interview is a good idea.
mshcat@reddit
In prep my interview I went back and looked at some of the CS classes at my school. A lot of them started putting assignments on github so I could copy the repo and work through the homework assignments to refresh my memory on how that language worked
gorimur@reddit
Been there with the career restart anxiety. I took a different path - walked away from Meta last year when I realized the real AI revolution was happening outside those walls. The corporate grind was killing my creativity anyway.
For getting back up to speed, I'd pick one modern stack and go deep instead of trying to learn everything. Python + FastAPI + some AI integration is where the jobs are right now. DSA can wait - most real work doesn't need leetcode gymnastics. I use Writingmate to bounce ideas off different AI models when I'm stuck on implementation details.. having GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4 side by side helps me think through problems from different angles. Your employer giving you time to skill up is gold - use it to build something real, not just follow tutorials.
bocamj@reddit
Your first step is opening those books you obtained in school and give yourself a refresher. If you sold your books back, then start where everyone starts, google searches.
In many respects, you're going to be starting over, so like u/Tall-Introduction414 says, you need to figure out what you want to do. We have no clue what you've learned, retained, if you want to work on the front end, back end, or if you even know the differenced between those options. I mean, you're pretty vague here.
And what AI tools and resources are you referring to? Just curious, you're vague about where to start, but you're aware of all these AI tools and resources? This is a bit confusing to me.
SScattered@reddit
Basically, do projects. That's what I think best for you
I wish you good luck!
Tall-Introduction414@reddit
What are you getting tripped up on? What to study? What kind of code to write? Languages? Frameworks and technologies? Project ideas?
Make some software. I think you have to want to create something that will be useful or fun to you. If you dogfood and iterate it enough, and even listen to feedback, it will eventually be good. If you make a few versions of something and then never use it again, you will be better when writing the next program. Building a portfolio isn't just about having something to show, but about progressing as a developer and building what you want.
What are you interested in besides computers? Music? Hacking? Finance? IMO you can go very far by combining humanities or other interests with software. Usually that is where software actually becomes useful.
If you are taking time at work to study this, then you should probably be writing code related to your job. That is, you get better at programming by writing programs, and programs written on your employers time might under contract belong to them, etc.