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Does this have any thing to do with me being extremely awful/slow at competitive programming? I tried a few online sites like codeforces, hackerrank, codechef and after a few easy problems, I ended up getting stuck for forever. I had to often look for the solution which was more than often a trick that I hadn't come across and my existing knowledge base failed to take me there.

Is there any way to improve this? To be honest, I am asking this because I am failing every single interview screening which generally involves trick questions. I would love to know the relation between the two.




I am a slow thinker, but had been moderately successful in competitive programming during high school days.

The trick is to code a lot outside of the competitions and know all these tricks, as well as to have common snippets of code in your fingertips.

I still find that experience quite useful in my day-to-day programming.


I would like to know more about this. Is there a proper book(s)/source(s) that I should follow? I never came across segment trees in my Data Structures class and I have rarely found the need to code one up in my job yet the screening process involved coding a question using segment trees. How do people get to know about these?


>Is there a proper book(s)/source(s) that I should follow?

You may find these book useful:

Competitive Programming 3 by Felix Halim and Steven Halim.

Competitive Programmer’s Handbook (https://cses.fi/book/index.html)

>I have rarely found the need to code one up in my job

Depending on your job profile, these data structures may not be used at all. But programming puzzles have become the norm for interviews in the industry.


Dude, same here! And it's not easy to squeeze out some time to practice with my tight work schedule. I'm just sticking to practice, hoping that more practice is what I need.




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