I Have 7 Years of Experience as a Software Engineer. DSA Still Kicked My Ass.

I build RESTful APIs for a living. I've designed event-driven architectures, set up CI/CD pipelines, containerized applications on Azure, mentored junior developers. 7 years of this.

Then I opened LeetCode and stared at a medium problem for 45 minutes and closed the tab.

Working as a backend engineer for this long means you just never touch advanced DSA. My day to day is .NET, Azure, SQL, clean architecture. EF Core handles the data layer, Azure handles the scaling. I haven't needed to implement a graph traversal or think about tree balancing since university.

So when I decided to start interviewing at bigger companies I figured I just needed a quick refresher. I studied this stuff in college. It would come back.

It didn't. 7 years is a long time and most of it was gone.