> Is the leetcode grind necessary to land a high paying remote job?

> Do you think grinding leetcode is an absolute necessity to land a good job at a company hiring worldwide remotely?

> ... western europe ... salaries around 80-100k$ ...

You've very clearly defined the problem, and I'd think the answer should be obviously "no". Are there any software engineers making that salary in that location who haven't ground leetcode (grinded?). I guess that term isn't very well defined, but let's be super generous and say it's spending more than 8 total hours practicing algorithms for the purpose of passing interviews.

So an equivalent question is "are there zero software engineers with a $100k salary in western europe who spent 0-8 hours practicing algorithms for their interviews?". I'm guessing if you asked that question you'd have a lot less "yes" on the poll.

Not exactly the best question though. It sounds like you're not categorically blocked from grinding leetcode. You have performance anxiety. Not diagnosing you, just rephrasing:

> it's not really about whether or not I can solve a hard leetcode problem, it's about if I want to do it live in front of a recruiter, it make me anxious just to think about that and I don't want to inflict that on myself

So is dealing with performance anxiety + the hours spent on leetcode worth the job? Is there another path to the job that's less work and/or higher probability? These are optimization questions. You won't get at their answers with asking about necessities.

My perspective is there are roughly three levels of algorithm skill that come up in interviews. First is the kind of stuff you really actually do on the job. A decent professional with a few years of experience should be fine with zero prep. FizzBuzz level, really. Level 2 is beyond what most people do in their jobs. Count the number of components in a graph. Really good engineers or people who practice will be able to do this. Level 3 is the stuff that just rarely comes up at all. Leetcode hard. Can't think of an example. Almost everyone needs dedicated work to get to this level.

I think level 2 and level 3 come up in similar proportion in interviews, and jobs that ask level 3 questions might pay a little better on average but not a ton and there's high variance. And, critically, getting to level 3 requires 10x the effort of getting to level 2.

With that framing, I think there is outsized benefit to getting to level 2. If anything, make sure your coverage of all possible problems at level 2 is great rather than go into level 3. Go for level 3 if you know you need to for a certain job, or algorithms is a strength you want to lean into. You should probably go for level 2.

Second piece of advice is you should split dealing with the anxiety and learning the algorithms. Think of them as separate problems, practice them separately. They can cloud each other. I've seen it so many times. The pain of performance anxiety will convince you algorithms are dumb and pointless and you shouldn't study since it has zero benefit. But it is benefitting you, it's getting you a job.

Anyway, you should probably just think of it as "practicing coding in front of people" instead of "anxiety". Not saying you need to see a therapist. You would probably do very well to try answering questions that are very easy for you, questions you already know the answer to, in front of someone. Maybe a record a video, maybe live stream it. Now you've separated the algo skill from the performance. Practice talking and coding alone. Separately improve the algo skill and combine them at the end.

Hope this helps.