I tried the two sum and found it kind of strange to do line by line recall, I thought the only way we could memorize hundreds of leetcode is to think in chunks that are several lines, not one line at a time
(I am reminded of a Fallout side quest, where you help a Museum retrieve artefacts and they talk about how the constitutions was moved around, maybe by airplane .. point being, history will be fun to reconstruct after a robot nuclear apocalypse)
Hi, I just realized that the confusion here was that you are only supposed to input the numeric user ID. I just limited the form to numbers only and updated the description to make this more clear.
"Legibility" is a distinct reference to Tom C. Scott's Seeing Like a State, and the tendency of states (or other large institutions) to attempt to impose legibility on complex problems, domains, or systems, usually in an attempt to manage or govern them, but often destroying that which makes them valuable in the first place:
It's not invisible, it's incomprehensible to most would-be employers because the information is not in a form that they can understand. That's not the same as invisible.
Passing some leetcode challenges is legible to employers, it puts applicants in the same buckets and measures them in (roughly) the same way. But it's not a good measure of actual talent. The real measures, as discussed in the article are out there but illegible to those employers.
It was a deliberate word choice by the author. "Illegible" conveys that it's difficult to track from the outside. It's a clever analogy: illegible hand writing can be read by those who are familiar with the scribe.
It's not invisible though: those who work with these kinds of engineers easily see how valuable they are.
It's not invisible, because some people can see it. It is illegible because the leadership of a large company won't know how to interpret it. This particular usage of "illegible" has been around for awhile, but is probably best known from the book, "Seeing Like A State":
I used to watch "China Insights" on YouTube and "ClearValue Tax" on YouTube for updates on the Fed and realized that I was only just clicking and watching all the negative headlines with individual stories that I could do absolutely nothing about so now I made a website https://toolong.link to convert those to articles and spend time watching comedy videos instead.
the recent stackoverflow survey said that only 25% of developers are actually happy at work https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/work#job-satisfaction-j... . Gallup said its only 33% of employees are engaged in the economy in general. Not everyone gets to go to conferences and network for Godot game engine like the author, most are doing super repetitive jobs. I definitely want an AI to automate as many as possible ASAP
