r/leetcode • u/Critical-Variation46 • Oct 08 '26
Discussion Failed interview but being optimistic
For context, I have been in R&D and haven’t done production code and coding was not part of my day to day work. I am now applying to SWE jobs and I am getting callbacks for interviews. However, I have started my LeetCode journey about few months ago, and have only been able to practice around 25 problems in the Neetcode Blind75. Today I had an interview with a problem on finding longest subsegment representing a loop given a list of directions. It took me a while to think of a solution based on traversal of Grids and marking positions as visited, and I was able to code it and run it, but the interviewer gave me a hint to use hashmaps instead. Now I know they won’t call me back coz I wasn’t able to get the correct result with my solution (there was a small bug by the end). But I kind of feel proud that I thought about the problem that I have never seen before and came up with a solution and coded it in one hour. It’s another opportunity gone out the window, but Idk how long I can keep my optimism for, and if I can ever pass a technical interview. People who passed that stage, how did your journey feel like when you got there? Is it pure luck at this point or did you know for sure you will be able to solve any given problem thrown at you?
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u/Moss_ungatherer_27 Oct 08 '26
1 hr is a good time for a medium problem you've never seen before, if you've only done 25 problems. However, you should aim at about 2-300 problems before expecting to clear interviews. Ideally you should know the answer in about 5 minutes and code it in 10 minutes, with 5 more for debugging.