your ability to solve leetcode problems has absolutely nothing to do with your ability as a computer scientist or software engineer; most of my friends haven't ever used leetcode (or even heard of it?) and have become CS PhD students, CS professsors, technical founders, open source maintainers reaching millions of people, and software engineers at assort big tech cos. The culture surrounding leetcode and gaming tech jobs is really toxic and you shouldn't let yourself get sucked into it.
It's no way to live drilling dumb little puzzles; there's this prevailing attitude that we should be grateful or it's not a big deal. But for me, it's been nothing be joyless, and I've found a lot of satisfaction working at companies that don't require these charades.
This take is essentially the "I have nothing to hide" argument except applied to China. Moreover, even if China is not interested in you in particular, it is interested in the executives, politicians, and decision makers that use our telecom infrastructure along with you. And you should care if those people are spied on by the Chinese government, probably more than about yourself being spied on by the US government.
While the US is not perfect and has executed a number of immoral/illegal projects, the world order under the US seems far superior to what a world order under China could be.
> While the US is not perfect and has executed a number of immoral/illegal projects, the world order under the US seems far superior to what a world order under China could be.
Which specific part of the Middle East are you thinking of with that little gem? I'm looking at Iran on a map and they are the last stable center amongst a sea of catastrophes from Syria to Afghanistan that all have the sticky fingerprints of American influence on them. The entire Arabian peninsula is a mess hold together only by US support and stands as a real-time embarrassment of all the rhetoric out of Washington in my lifetime.
Compared to that, what exactly is China likely to do that could be worse?
The US has a bunch of stuff they can be proud of, but nobody is going to (indeed nobody is) take them seriously when their ambassadors hand-wringing about the risks of foreign spies or foreign influence. The US has been doing whatever they feel like for decades with little regard for anyone else and they have not shown themselves to be particularly honourable when there are real stakes, like oil, on the table.
One place where China could do worse than US (or in the case of Syria, Russian) influence is internet access. In the Middle East there is some filtering and blocking on internet connections, but it remains trivial to circumvent and many computer-savvy teenagers already know how. China has already shown that it is interested in exporting its Great Firewall technology -- which is very challenging to circumvent -- to nations with which it establishes close ties.
