Been at it for the past 3 months. It is soul crushing and demoralizing. I'm starting to accept that I would rather work in a toxic company than have to go back job searching.
I recommend you keep at it, I also hated interviewing and it would give me anxiety which made me draw blanks and under perform embarrassingly a couple interviews.
The trick for me was diligently applying to as many places as possible (that were at least somewhat of a fit), and eventually coming across one where the main technical part of it was "take home". Coding and discussing thought processes on the spot for an audience isn't something I'm good at it turns out, but solving a practical problem on my own time was fine.
It's ultimately a numbers game, the more places you apply to, the more likely you'll find an interview process that fits. That is the most important thing to keep in mind--shotgun blast those applications. It's hard not to take rejection personally, but don't give up and settle for a toxic job, that's even worse.
If you can, take some time off and do something for yourself. I got way too caught up in the grind, was spending every spare moment on leetcode and algorithms, and all I felt was a gnawing desperation to succeed and get an offer. I took time off and refocused on what was important to me. I started hiking and biking and doing things that interested me. I stopped leetcoding at all. When I next interviewed a couple of months later, I didn’t even study and I didn’t need to, I came across as confident, and I got 2 offers right away. Fortunately I had a job at the time so I was able to go back to business as usual without it affecting my finances, but being in that situation without a job terrifies me.
Is it really that bad? I've taken the time to go back to some great books I never got a chance to fully study, like Udi Manber's Introduction to Algorithms and Jeff Erickson's Algorithms and even found some new gems like Guide to Competitive Programming and Competitive Programming 4 Book 1.
I don't know if this is sarcasm or not, but in case you're serious. The fact that you feel the need to approach this like you're a gladiator preparing for mortal combat in the arena of the mind, is really not OK. Our industry's interviews shouldn't be like this
I majored in computer engineering and skipped algorithms so it was pretty intense studying for a couple of months before I felt comfortable. Overall I really enjoyed learning it but I made it through so many successful years of software engineering without learning it that I don’t think it’s relevant to most people. Even now I write an O(n) algorithm to merge sorted lists and people comment on my PR just tell me to throw everything in an array and use the sort function.
The mindfuck when you realize cache locality can make an O(log n) algo faster than an O(1) algo, and the big-O analysis only really matters for extremely large data sets. :D
