AlgoExpert In Depth Review - Better Than Leetcode?

hey guys how's it going today i wanted to do a quick review of algo expert algo export is one of the products that you can use uh during your preparations for tech interviews for companies like facebook amazon google microsoft so and so forth and i frequently get asked via my instagram dms what i thought about algae expert in comparison with something like lead good uh so i thought i'd briefly talk about not only algae expert but how it compares to something like leap code all right before we get started if you're new to this channel i usually talk about software engineering productivity tech interviews and that kind of stuff so if you're into it please click the subscribe button and hit the notification bell so you don't miss any new content that i make all right let's get started so for the data structures sort of crash course it's got a good amount of material what are data structures complexity analysis memory beagle logarithmic stuff arrays linked list you know it's like an introduction i think each video is around 10 to 30 minutes long this is pretty useful and pretty well done i think clem makes uh really good videos and he's like a very good explainer of things but here's where i question the value of this if you are wondering what data structures are when you're buying algae expert dot io then you're not gonna do many of those problems right like the assumption here is like if you don't know what data structures even are or or what an array is you won't be able to solve any of this problem let alone like the difficult ones right like so while this is useful as part of a prep tool that preps you for especially like top tier tech interviews i i don't see value in this it's nice but if you are looking at this learning hash tables right now you're in bigger trouble and lead code has a very similar approach where they go very practical code first approach in their explore section i think i prefer that because they don't really talk about the fundamentals of the data structure they just assume that you know and they'll just be like hey how do we add stuff to this how do we remove stuff to this and they'll give you a reasonable question that kind of covers that topic and i think that's better uh the coding interview question is the next section i think this this section is pretty well laid out it's organized by category or you can group it by difficulty and and it's got a decent amount of question i do love the quality over quantity approach i think a lot of time we fall into the pitfall of doing mindlessly doing a lot of problems but not really grasping the core concepts behind it so i do like that it's focusing on a limited set of high quality problem but that being said i also have an issue because we don't know why these problems were picked right like i mean you can trust clem and his team to do the best job here but it's still a subjective list of questions i do think these are a decent amount of questions and decent value but why were these questions picked over the others right like we don't know i wish they told us like hey this covers this technique and maybe like uh some another grouping by technique or something like that but at this moment okay i mean there are a lot of questions that are very hard right like why these questions are picked i don't know versus if you go to lead code if you look at it there are a lot of questions but they've got difficulty and most importantly they've got frequency so you can try to sort by frequency do the highest frequency questions you can see what are what acceptance rates are so like you can try things that a lot of other people are failing to do well you know you can also sort by company so you know if you're interviewing at microsoft for example you can sort by like you can filter by microsoft and then sort by highest frequency and then attack it that way and then of course it's got the regular categorization and stuff like that so i think this is a much richer form of picking the best problems to practice versus even though this is focused on quality we don't have a good explanation of why these are the best problems to do that if they made that clear i think this would have much more value in my mind but i mean overall it's it's it's good so the other section here in the coding part is coding interview assessment uh and this is typically like your on-site or or online assessment emulation here i think lead code has something similar where it's a mock and you can like sort of try your mock interviews and it'll give you like buy company here but this one's just generic and i tried doing one and if i click on it it says assessments are difficult complete 10 or more normal questions to unlock it just assumes that it's too difficult maybe maybe i can do it you know maybe i can but at least let me try it and then if i fail then sort of tell me to do practice problems before i attempt another one it's just like do 10 i mean i think it's trying to gamify it but this is kind of i have no i don't have time to solve 10 questions to kind of look at this i suspect it's very similar to lead codes where you can click on an online assessment section and you'll always say like two hours one hours whatever and i'm sure it'll give you like a dashboard of like where you land what sort of your performance is and that kind of stuff sort of similar to lead code so all right so the next section i want to talk about is the coding interface itself so let's pick like a random question here like this guy and then just talk about the interface it's got a layout option where it's squad or try i definitely like the try much better if i were them i didn't remove the raw output section over here because it makes it a little bit cluttered by my the overall design is really intuitive right you know what this does you know the languages a lot of language options you can choose the font you can choose your text editor commands you can do dark theme or light theme and then a lot of other highlight options coloring options you can do remove highlighting and then i love the data visualizer as well so it's pretty intuitive and i love the fact that they also had a timer here which is really critical because you want to always practice on a timed session right the overall design and functionality is really outstanding here it's really useful it does feel like you're using a full ide the only concern i have it's it's a little bit too cluttered it has too many options on the screen versus the interface in lead code is much simpler really i really like this clean interface because what you want to do is you want to have a interface that mimics your real interview setting because that believe it or not even if it affects you like five percent it does affect you when you do a real interview you're either using things like google docs or codepath dot io and like things like that all of them are very simple they're like one question or there's not even one question it's just like a plain document and the interview usually pastes the question to you so you want to mimic that as much as possible because when you're stressed under interview settings that familiarity really helps when you actually go for a real interview it's probably going to be more like this right so you want to emulate sort of that kind of situation so i wish they had like a minimalist view where i don't need to see anything or at least they would disappear hide out of the screen and then i'd have just that bit so that it could emulate a real situation that's the only feedback other than that they have one solution video explanation and his explanation claims explanation are phenomenal i'll just tell you that much one thing though like when in in in lead code uh related to this is you've got a solution and it's crowds crowdsourced right because it's crowdsource um it's got like multiple ways of doing this like dp approach brute force and then they'll explain you usually the solutions in different languages there's a discussion section here down below that people will argue about things and sometimes like discussions have like better answers than actual answers you know and then you've also got the discuss sections here where people will like really talk about like someone's posted a video like i think that is way more beneficial than just one solution and i know like this is probably the one of the best optimal solutions but because it's just from one person you don't really get to see the different perspectives right on the positive side on lead code sometimes like easy and short right like easy and short doesn't really always mean readable or like that's probably not how you want to write it and i've seen some really bad solutions in discussions as well so because it's it's a discussion in crowdsource you have to kind of weed through the bad solutions yourself so both have pros and cons one you'll get to see multiple perspectives and pick and choose which which is more intuitive to you uh versus in here it's curated by one person or a team of people so it's always consistent always high quality but you don't always get the second angle or alternative alternative perspective that's more intuitive to you so so overall i think they've done a great job but for now i think because of the of the multiple different angles of explanations discussions like you know written solutions and multiple approaches i would still and and the simple minimalistic interface i think i'd still give lead code as as the winner here all right let's go to the system design which is which was more interesting to me so the next content here in algae expert is systems systems expert i suppose i think it's a good introduction uh to system design and and like i said clem is a really good explainer of things but so there are like 25 videos here i watched most of them it just serves these videos just serve as an introduction to something existing right it doesn't really teach you system design and honestly like to be fair to the team at algae expert you can't just learn system design by watching 10 12 or 25 15 20 minute videos you know like system design is one like there are many books written about it there are a lot of like deep technical knowledge that is required and a lot of times it's just about you building years of experience and kind of understanding the trade-off based on your experience right so even if they really wanted to make this a thorough system design question it would really be difficult but i need to kind of like be critical about it because it's a paid service and the question is always is does it provide value right and at this point i think because it's impossible to teach system design as a course because it's a it's like like like almost like a life learning learn lifelong learning experience right um it's it's really impossible to put it down in like videos let alone like 25 very high level videos but you will get the basic concepts so this could be a great starting point where you get the topics get a brief understanding about them and then kind of go like study in depth on your own you know the other problem i had with system design from algae expert or systems expert is the actual videos themselves i looked at a few of them and the problem here is like the good thing is that it i think it has a good set of questions it covers from like your apis to you know like video distribution to messaging and news feed which has like a big fan out problem for big social media so like i think it has a good breath but the problem is the actual mock interview the interviewer almost agrees to everything clem says and that is absolutely no not how it is in a real interview the solutions proposed in the video are good but then because system design doesn't really have a right or wrong solution the interviewer can can and will always ask you for an alternative option right for example like a lot of times here clem will pick my sequel and never talk about why he chose my sequel over something like you know like a maybe a doc db or maybe like a white column like cassandra right so it's fine to pick my sequel there's no nothing wrong about it but you need to be able to reason about the trade-off on why it could just be simple to get started it could just be that's all you know and you don't have much experience about y column that's fine but the interviewer will ask oh interesting why not a white column or why not this why not that right like that absolutely lacks here and the some of the follow-up questions the interviewer asked is too basic it's like it's it's not uh it's not representative of a real interview and then like even like my sequel right like they may go into details about replications and like the headaches you can have with like asynchronous replication in my sequel versus um like a more like a note based uh leaderless system like cassandra like what are the trade-offs in that where will you struggle on the other end that kind of stuff isn't really it's very hand-wavy and like no none of the videos really go into detail about it and in general i think it's probably okay for a super entry-level you know l3 e3 uh 59 at microsoft that kind of level but anything over that i don't think this will cut it i think it's a great starting point i know they just added this uh and i think it will evolve and become better over time but as of now just take it as a super high level introduction to system design and not like a interview prep level detail and then finally system design as a quiz you don't really gain any knowledge from it you just learn the keywords like oh reverse proxy can be used as a load balancer and nginx is a popular choice you learn that from the quiz but in a real interview what value is that because the interview is gonna easily ask you hey why are you using reverse perks proxy instead of a hardware load balancer right like or why nginx instead of ha proxy or why use application level load balancer instead of a network level load balancer what happens when your load balancer doesn't are are at capacity how do you handle that for failovers what's like uh why would you choose or which situation would you choose active active or active passive like you don't really you don't really get any of that from here so just take it as a very high level course the interviewer needs to be much more intense about his questions and in depth about his trade-off discussions and alternative uh discussions kind of thing this is too agreeable so that's my that's my thing uh and then the final section honestly is the is the bonus which has behavioral which is i think pretty decent and the trick about behavioral is like no one can really teach you behavioral based on your situation because your situation is always unique but what videos i saw there i think like i said clem is a great explainer of things and i think i agree with all of the videos is really good uh he talks about the right things and then the and then the the coding interview tips is also on point uh all of it is pretty accurate and obviously he has a lot of experience with it too uh the algo expert certificate is a pure gimmick like i don't see any value in that and i don't think any company cares about whether you completed algae expert or not uh but it's cool it's like a gamified system right hey i did it so like maybe some swag with your friends if you're competing that could work you know so as far as pricing goes um for the core algae expert value um like the coding part alone it's 99 bucks i honestly think lead code is a way better value at this point uh because lead code free itself gives you a lot of questions and the coding interface and all that so that's almost comparable to the paid version of algo expert and if you wanted extra features like discussions mocks and like other resources it's slightly more expensive at 159 but i do think you get a much larger collection of questions better categorization by company frequency a discussion forum where people share their interview experiences and things like that and the solutions are crowdsourced so you get multiple angles of solutions so i think as of now i would pick a lead code as a better value and not algae expert for systems expert there is no counterpart in lead code maybe you could get something like rocking the system design which again i think is too eye level as well but honestly just talking about systems expert alone at 79 maybe if you are right out of school um or college maybe this is worth the 79 but for anything over like if you have already some amount of industry experience this will not got it you'll have to spend a significant lay more amount time in learning system designs whether it's reading engineering blogs looking at conferences and talks given by various companies buying multiple books i would rather spend on that than this and then the final thing is the combined value at 139 and again like i said because of how these other two have worked out i still think this is the direct comparison to lead code premium which is at 160 bucks a month is slightly more expensive but i still still till now think it's a better value and if you just had some money to spend out spend it on that so that's basically it guys uh that's my review of algo expert and what i think about it especially compared to lead code and like i said before this could change a year from now or even six months from now because i know the team at algo expert is rapidly iterating and adding new features so please consider this review with the notion of time in mind that being said uh if you want me to review any other product related to engineering or tech interviews please do let me know i've tried a lot of different products ranging from really cost effective ones that are like 20 30 to really expensive that can cost thousands of dollars so i can provide some insight if you guys are looking into that kind of stuff so let me know in the comments below and thanks for watching see you around [Music] cheers

Channel: Engineering with Utsav

Views: 54,077

Keywords: algoexpert review, algoexpert vs leetcode, algoexpert system design, algoexpert interview, algoexpert, tech lead, algoexpert.io, algoexpert clem, software engineering, system design, system design interviews, web development, data structures, software developer, clément mihailescu, hacker rank, algo expert, coding interview, coding interview prep, coding interviews, technical interview, computer science, cracking the coding interview, web developer, google interview, faang

Id: sVsFfsAicE4

Length: 18min 12sec (1092 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 13 2020