After years as an infrastructure engineer, I've found that LeetCode-style interviews don't reflect the actual skills needed to build and maintain production systems. I'm happy to walk through my real projects, discuss architecture decisions, or do practical coding sessions instead.
The Reality of Infrastructure Work
In my day-to-day work building data platforms and ETL pipelines for millions of users, I've never needed to:
- Invert a binary tree on a whiteboard
- Implement a graph traversal algorithm from scratch
- Optimize for theoretical time complexity without context
What I do need to do every day:
- Debug distributed systems across multiple services
- Make architectural trade-offs between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance
- Read and understand others' code to maintain and extend existing systems
- Collaborate with teams to design scalable solutions
- Navigate AWS, Kubernetes, and real-time data processing challenges
- Balance technical debt against feature delivery
What I Offer Instead
I'm happy to demonstrate my skills through:
Project Walkthroughs: Pick any project from my GitHub. I'll walk you through the architecture, explain design decisions, discuss what I'd do differently now, and answer technical questions about implementation details.
Architecture Discussions: Give me a real problem your team is facing. I'll discuss potential approaches, trade-offs, and how I'd think through the solution. This shows how I actually work through technical challenges.
Code Review Sessions: Review some of my production code or I can review yours. This demonstrates how I think about maintainability, testing, documentation, and collaboration.
Pair Programming: Work together on a real task or refactoring. See how I communicate, problem-solve in real-time, and handle ambiguity.
The Trade-Off I'm Making
I understand this eliminates opportunities at companies with rigid hiring processes. That's intentional.
Companies that require LeetCode are optimizing for a specific kind of filtering mechanism. I respect that choice, but I'm optimizing for fit - both for me and for the team.
I want to work somewhere that values:
- Real-world experience over performance under artificial pressure
- Practical problem-solving over memorized algorithms
- Building systems that serve people over optimizing for interview pipelines
- Seeing how someone actually works versus how they perform in an artificial test
If your interview process is flexible enough to evaluate candidates through their actual work, we're probably a good mutual fit.
What This Filters For
This approach naturally selects for:
- Teams that value demonstrated ability over credentials
- Companies building real products over optimizing hiring funnels
- Engineering cultures focused on collaboration and practical skills
- Organizations willing to invest time in seeing how candidates actually think
These are the places where I do my best work.
Questions?
Reach out at nikki.ricks@gmail.com. I'm happy to discuss how we can evaluate fit in a way that works for both of us.
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