Problem is, reading is at least an order of magnitude easier than writing.
In terms of natural languages, if you can read and mostly understand a text in another language, let's say you score 8/10. At the same time it is completely reasonable to expect that you would not be able to write the same text, and if you had to, it would be at 5/10. Then if you had to do it in a speech, you would score a measly 3/10.
I'm not saying that focusing on reading and analyzing code is a bad idea, just be careful, and expect these differences in skill levels. Definitely a hundred times better than leetcode though.
In my professional experience there is a lot of poorly writtem, convoluted spaghetti code, that is extremely hard to follow. Im not sure why people seem think reading code is easier than writing code... this is often not the case.
And OO spaghetti ("lasagna") can be the worst. Class hierarchies 6 levels deep. Some methods overridden. Needless abstract classes with single implementations. "Logic" spread out all over the code base.
In terms of natural languages, if you can read and mostly understand a text in another language, let's say you score 8/10. At the same time it is completely reasonable to expect that you would not be able to write the same text, and if you had to, it would be at 5/10. Then if you had to do it in a speech, you would score a measly 3/10.
I'm not saying that focusing on reading and analyzing code is a bad idea, just be careful, and expect these differences in skill levels. Definitely a hundred times better than leetcode though.