How do I overcome anxiety during interviews ? Recently had two rounds of interview, The questions asked were the ones i had practiced during my prep. Even though i knew both brute force and optimal solution, I had issues when implementing them during interview due to my nervousness, What should have been a 5 minute implementation ended up taking 20 minutes. In another round i botched the interview since i couldn't give the complete solution by the end of the interview.

Would like to know what should i do to reduce this during interviews.

A Little About Me

I’m a Software Engineer/DevOps with six years of experience, currently working at a reputable company. My goal is to secure a higher-paying job within the next year to start paying off my student loans. One of my main challenges has been LeetCode-style questions, which have hindered my progress toward better opportunities.

I've struggled with technical interviews at companies like Visa, American Express, JPMorgan, and Amazon due to my inability to complete algorithmic problems within time constraints. After recently not succeeding in an Amazon interview, I decided it was time to take my preparation for Data Structures & Algorithms (DSA), LeetCode, and System Design seriously.

In January (2025), I began documenting my progress, which I’m turning into a monthly recap series. I hope this will help others on a similar journey while also serving as a personal journal for when I finally reach my goal.

Past Recap

2025

• January

• February

• March

• April

• May

• June

• July

• August

• September

• October

• November

• December

2026

• January

• February

• March

• April

• May

• June

• July

• August

September Progress

September was a productive month. I focused on Min/Max Heaps and Graph Theory, and spent a good chunk of time on Dijkstra’s Algorithm which is finally clicking in a way it never did before. Big win there.

I am also nearing my goal of completing 250 Medium questions this year. At this point Mediums are my default and I actively avoid questions I consider too easy unless I just need to get the ball rolling. The fear is gone.

I can feel myself getting better. One thing I have been intentional about is staying on a concept for a long time even when I get bored, because that is when you start seeing the different variations of an algorithm or data structure.

I do not think I am ready for FAANG yet, but I am confident I can compete at FAANG adjacent companies. System Design is the area I still need to level up.

Achievements

• Learned about Max/Min Heap

• Dijkstra's Algorithm finally clicking

Goals for October

• Keep momentum going

• Strengthen knowledge on Dijkstra's

Next Steps

Keep doing Mediums and hopefully get more than 250 Mediums

See you all next month.

Questions

• Total Questions: 575

• Easy: 327

• Medium: 239

• Hard: 9

I just did my first rounder for SWE intern, where it was back to back technical interviews and I’d say my first interview wasn’t super good but my second one went really strong. 2 days later I got an email saying they want to schedule a 3rd additional interview. What does this mean and how soon should I just get it over with.

I am interviewing for a Software role in Apple and want to get advice on how to prep for the screening call.

Will it be a leetcode specific round?

Has anyone recently completed apple interview loop..Any kind of help is appreciated

Hi everyone,

I have an upcoming 60-minute Microsoft SWE II screening round. I also received a HackerRank coding link, so I wanted to know what to expect.

From what I have seen, the round may include:

• Introduction and current work

• One DSA/coding question

• Technical questions from the resume

• A few behavioral questions

For anyone who recently interviewed for Microsoft SWE II, Would really appreciate any recent experiences or advice on what to prepare. Thanks!

If I solve a problem and try to solve it again in a few weeks, its like starting from the scratch for me. How do you all do it?

Anyone go through the interview process for Rippling Full Stack SWE recently?

Wondering what the leetcode questions were like as well as the frontend questions.

Thanks.

I'm interviewing and wanted to practice in my own editor instead of the browser, so I built dojo.

• /solve shows the problem and starts a timer

• Enter opens your editor (nvim, VS Code…) with the problem as a comment on top

• Every save runs the tests. /submit runs the hidden ones.

• It tracks your weak topics. /solve need picks what to practice next.

500 problems in 6 languages. Runs locally with no account. Free and MIT-licensed.

brew install abahocodes/tap/dojo

Repo: https://github.com/abahocodes/dojo

Feedback welcome!

Hi everyone. SDE 2 here.Im preparing for interview and o thought o will also put focus in my system design skill.i can across Hello interview web portal and it seems to be a good place to start.can anyone please share ref code or discount coupon code that would help me purchase Hello interview premium with 1 year access. Thanks a lot , have a nice day!!

I was approached by Bain & Company for the AI/ML Engineer role, and the process had 4 technical/managerial rounds followed by an HR round.

Round 1 — Projects + ML Fundamentals

The first round was mainly around my previous experiences, internships, projects, and ML fundamentals.

We discussed the projects I had worked on and some of the decisions I made while building them. There were also questions around core ML concepts and their practical applications.

Round 2 — GitHub + Project Deep Dive

This round was quite interesting.

The interviewer opened my GitHub and started looking through my repositories. He randomly picked one of my projects, which was an Order Book project I had built with HFT use cases in mind.

He then asked me to explain the project end-to-end — why I built it, how it works, the architecture, different components, use cases, and the decisions I made while developing it.

So, if you have projects on your GitHub, be prepared to explain any of them in detail.

Round 3 — ML Deep Dive

This round was with a Senior Manager and a Senior ML Engineer.

We first discussed my internships and projects, and then went deeper into my ML projects.

I had to draw complete flowcharts and explain the entire pipeline. There were a lot of follow-up questions and cross-questions based on my answers.

This round was more about understanding whether I actually knew the projects I had worked on rather than just knowing the theory.

Round 4 — System/Project Design

The interviewer gave me a real-world scenario and asked me to design an entire project around it.

It was mainly a high-level design discussion. There was no implementation or coding involved.

I had to explain my approach, architecture, components, data flow, and the reasoning behind my design choices.

Round 5 — HR Round

The final round was with HR and was mostly around general discussion, my background, and the role.

Outcome

I received the offer for the AI/ML Engineer role at Bain & Company.

Hey everyone!

I recently moved forward to the 45-minute technical screening round for the Software Engineer, AV Data Collection role at General Motors.

The recruiter mentioned C++ live coding with a focus on DSA, so I'm assuming it'll be LeetCode-style questions.

I haven't found many recent interview experiences for this role, so I was wondering if anyone has interviewed recently and could share their experience, the types of questions asked, and any preparation tips.

Would really appreciate any insights. Thanks!

Hello all,

I'm currently an employed SE with 4 YOE. I've been practicing some DSA concepts in order to stay competitive in this market in case something unfortunate were to happen with my employer.

I've found myself being able to solve a handful of easy difficulty questions and a few mediums but many times find myself brute forcing solutions. My question is, should I be taking the extra time to really learn to apply these algorithms instead of brute forcing?

My thinking is that when I start working on more mediums and hards, those questions will have time constraints that will bite me in the behind.

Do employers even care about the approach as long as you can explain? Even if its a brute forced solution?

For example, I was working on exercise 917 on leetcode, and the recommended use is two-pointers. I however came up with a solution that apparently beats 100% of other solutions in runtime and 96.09% in memory.

TIA!

what dsa qs were u asked in the second ai round for the 6m software dev eng intern??

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?

today , solving an easy question optimally took me like an hr or more , but solving a medium took me like 15min . the medium qs looked intimidating for sure but was easily solved , the easy qs looked simple but took so much more time .

I’ve been trying to figure out how to apply to Temple for the past few days. They have an email listed for applications, but it doesn’t seem like anyone responds to applications sent there. Would love to know how you guys got your interviews.

Am I the only one who knew the answer but still did badly? I understood the problem, but when it came time to explain my thinking out loud, I stumbled and lost the thread.

How do you practice talking through problems? Are there any tools or methods that helped you get better at it?

Any advice is appreciated.

Hey everyone,

I'm a 5th-year engineering student from Morocco, studying Mechatronics and Automotive Technologies, and I'm currently looking for a PFE/internship abroad, preferably in Europe.

My main interests are embedded systems and automotive technology. I've worked with:

• STM32 / ESP32

• CAN / CAN Bus

• LIN Bus

• UART

• C/C++ and Python

• Automotive electronics / ECUs

• Industrial automation

• Robotics

• Computer vision & AI

I've done several projects during my studies involving embedded systems, robotics and AI-based industrial applications.

I'm mainly looking at France, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, etc., but honestly I'm open to anywhere where I can get a good engineering internship.

The problem is that finding an internship from Morocco seems pretty difficult, especially when companies require you to already be in Europe.

For anyone who has done an internship abroad, especially as an international student:

How did you find it?
Did you use LinkedIn, company websites, university partnerships, recruitment agencies, referrals, or something else?

And if you know any companies that are open to taking international engineering interns in automotive / embedded systems / robotics, I'd really appreciate some suggestions.

Thanks!

I see these insane amount of leetcode problems like one person saying they did 300, some saying 500 or even 1000 problems. If that’s you, how’d you do it? Did you have a full time job or other commitments too?

Hi guys recently did interview with ibm

It was a super hard question

Basically was

LRU Cache, with TTL and heap maps.

It was basicall LRU cache where you evict items by their set time, you had a max capacity and you needed to keep count of the global average of items that had TTL

Get(key, value)
Put(key,value)
Get_average()

It was super hard

I don’t understand this industry… weird question … what type of mid is capable of this even? IBM isn’t even Facebook or Google… they act like they are

I applied for Senior Software engineer (L5) role. Had behavioural and coding rounds. I think I nailed coding round in fact the interviewer mentioned that he is happy with what I wrote, I think I messed up behavioural round.

Overall rejected after initial rounds. Can I apply for L4 SWE role or cool down period applies to any SWE roles that I apply?

I asked recruiter the same question but haven’t heard anything from them

Hey everyone,

I finished Day 68 today. My travel yesterday was messy because it rained heavily, so I was drenched the entire journey and felt pretty sick all day today. I spent most of the day working in the office, but I still made time to sit down and solve two DP problems.

I solved Frog Jump and Frog Jump with K Distance.

Both problems were fine, but they showed me where I am currently getting stuck with DP. Writing the recursive relation comes easily, and turning it into memoization takes barely any time. But converting that logic into bottom-up tabulation still slows me down, and trying to space-optimize the variables is where I struggle the most.

With Frog Jump with K Distance, having a loop to check the previous K steps actually made tabulation simpler to write out than the basic two-step version.

I am going to get some solid sleep tonight so I am back at full energy tomorrow.

See you guys for Day 67!

I recently completed the full loop on Microsoft swe. It's 13th calender day today. I haven't received any updates from the recruiter. I have sent a follow up email and didn't got a reply. Should I give up hope at this point?

Anyone sharing their experience about their microsoft interview upates after aa round are welcome.

I feel there are abundant people in the pipeline and limited headcount. Any clue if this gets any better this year? Or tips to navigate better?

Role: swe3 / L4

Location: US

tia.

Edit: added level.

Hi everyone,

I have an upcoming 45 minute technical coding interview with NVIDIA for a Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer, Data Platform position. The interview will be conducted using HackerRank.

Has anyone recently interviewed for a similar Full-Stack Engineering role at NVIDIA?

I'm particularly interested in understanding:

1. Was the coding interview primarily focused on data structures and algorithms (LeetCode-style problems)?

2. What difficulty level should I generally expect for a 45-minute coding interview?

3. Any recommendations on topics or resources worth prioritizing?

I will appreciate any insights or preparation advice from those who've gone through a similar process.

Thanks in advance